


Aeviternity

by rosweldrmr



Series: Aeviternity Verse [1]
Category: Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Comics), Thor (Movies), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Norse Religion & Lore, Alternate Universe - Movie & Comic Fusion, BAMF Jane Foster, Comic Book Science, Dubious Science, F/M, Fake Science, Lady Thor, Magic and Science, Marvel Norse Lore, Mighty Lokane, Old Norse, Thor!Jane
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2016-03-02
Packaged: 2018-04-27 10:59:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 50,378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5045719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosweldrmr/pseuds/rosweldrmr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If she be worthy... | Or the one where Jane is the New Thor and works with Earth's mightiest warriors, the Gardians of the Galaxy, and the princes of Asgard to stop the Mad Titan, Thanos from destroying the universe. She will struggle with her own humanity as Loki shows her just how fine the line is between magic and science. | (MCU post AoU) Slow burn Thor!Jane/Loki</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Origins

**Author's Note:**

> This is dedicated to all my fandom friends who have let me pester them over the past two months while I wrote this monster. Especially Miya, Ivy, Lisa, and Pat-a-tat. Also the the new fandom friends I made who let me bug them about this fic. Sylwia, Gabby, Diana, and Star Traveller. You have all helped me so much! I couldn't have done this without you.
> 
> \--
> 
> There will be footnotes provided at the end of each chapter for research and inspiration related to that chapter.

**ae•vi•ter•ni•ty** /ˌæ.vɫ.ˈtɚ.nə.tɫ/ _n._ [C] (pl. **aeviternities** )  **1** Eternal existence. **2** The midpoint between time and eternity; sometimes referred to as **improper eternity**. **3** The mode of being of the angels, saints, and **celestial bodies**. [From the Medieval Latin neologism aeviternitas.] — aev•um _n._

\--

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” ― Carl Sagan

\--

Jane Foster is born in a storm. Her parents stumble into an ER at 3:56 PM, soaking wet and wind-swept.

The hospital loses power just as the Earth comes into alignment with Asgard, connected by the branches of the World Tree. Her parents know nothing about it, or what lies beyond, in the other realms. They have more important things to worry about.

Emergency generators kick in, and a soft rumble fills the halls. The corridors are dimmed to emergency power, and ominous red exit signs light their way to a delivery room.

Jane will not wait.

She is born in a clap of thunder that precedes a bolt of lightning that scorches the sky and cleaves a tree in the parking lot in two. Distantly, they can hear the crunch of metal and shatter of glass just before the wailing cry of their daughter drowns it out.

What they cannot know, will never know, is their daughter is born with lightning in her soul, thunder in her heart, and chaos in her bones.[1] She is destined for greatness beyond the mortal realm.

And very soon now, her veins will boil over with rage and power the likes of which a human has never known.

Someday poets will write that the blood of stars did flow through her veins,[2] burning like fire and cool to the touch. They will write of her beauty and might and intellect. Someday she will have the power to rule worlds.

Someday. But not the stormy day she was born. That was just a nor'easter, come in from the Atlantic to drench the locals and wash the beaches away.

It's the worst storm on record in 100 years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/127940541853>
> 
> [2] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/118298764945>


	2. Introduction: Constellations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In honor of Diana finishing my [commissions](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/132036934442), I give you the second part of the intro.

"It has always irked me as improper that there are still so many people for whom the sky is no more than a mass of random points of light. I do not see why we should recognize a house, a tree, or a flower here below and not, for example, the red Arcturus up there in the heavens as it hangs from its constellation Bootes, like a basket hanging from a balloon." ― M.C. Escher

\--

Jane is a scientist. In her blood and bones, she’s known it for as long as she’s known the word. Maybe before then too. Since her earliest memories of dyeing flower petals vibrant colors with her mother.

She would explain, in that excited way she did when she was happy, that the colored water traveled up the stems and into the petals. Jane can still remember the wonder she felt at learning the _how_ of a thing. She stood for hours on their porch, turning the flower this way and that in the sun, thinking about the way some petals were more colorful than others.

That had been the beginning.

Later, when she was in middle school her father took her on a father-daughter stargazing camping trip. She can still remember the cold autumn air; the cloudless, moonless sky that almost _sang_ with stars. So many of them, she thought, too many to name and count. She listened as her father taught her about different celestial bodies. He taught her the names of them, both their common name and Messier assignment.

Like the flower on the porch, Jane remembers it like the flipping of a switch inside her. A moment where her world shuddered and yawned wide and doubled in size. When she realized there was a reason behind why something behaved a certain way, a reason that could be observed and replicated and predicted. That was her first epiphany, when she realized that she wanted to spend the rest of her life _figuring it out_. Under the stars on that camping trip she took her next step. The day she looked up at the stars and really understood that it wasn’t just beautiful; it was impossible.

Looking at the stars, her father took his hand and guided hers to point up, tracing a shape in the sky.

“Cassiopeia,” he told her. “Then Pegasus.” He drew another shape she couldn’t see.

“I don’t see it,” she admitted and felt small and foolish. But she knew it was okay to not know, as long as she was honest about it, and learned. Her father valued knowledge above all else, so Jane did too.

He just laughed, a sound that filled her with an immense sense of _home_. “I’ve never been good at it either, playing connect the dots with the skeleton frames of contorted mythical creatures. It’s okay. Look for the box,” he instructed. “Pegasus. And here, these that look like a lightning bolt is Cassiopeia.”

“I see it!” she exclaimed and he hugged her, his beard tickling her cheek as he looked over her shoulder.

“This crooked V is Andromeda.” He drew a line from the corner where Pegasus met Andromeda to one of the peaks of Cassiopeia. Then he drew another intersecting line from the two middle spokes of Andromeda. “And there, at the intersection of those two lines, is the Andromeda galaxy.”

It took her a while, and her hands and nose were cold by the time she saw it, but there it was. A smudge of light that was brighter than the surrounding stars. Jane stood rapt as she listened to her father explain that this wasn’t a star.

“It’s a galaxy. The farthest object you can see with the naked eye.”

Even though her feet ached and her stomach growled and her eyes drooped, she wanted to learn more. He told her it was called M31. He told her it was 2.3 million light years away. And she marveled at it: 2.3 million. So she looked up and tried to picture it in her mind, the distance that span meant. But she couldn’t. It was too big, and she had no frame of reference. The best she could do was picture how many zeros that was. Five, which was more zeros than she’d seen behind _anything_. It was just an impossibly large number that meant _really far away_. He told her it was a galaxy, like the Milky Way, but bigger. He told her that when she looked up at the night sky, she was looking back in time, seeing an echo, a picture, of what it had looked like millions of years ago. He told her that in another 4 billion years ( _billion!_ ), it would collide with our galaxy, destroying the two, but leaving behind all the raw ingredients to form a _new_ galaxy.

And just like that, the world doubled in size again.

\--

She thinks of her father, his large hands on her shoulders, guiding her hands to trace the stars, his beard against her cheek and the sound of his laugh, when they tell her she’s going to die.


	3. Chapter 1: If She Be Worthy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The order of her medical file alarms her, lab tests with white cell counts and percentages and biopsy results that positively declare the polyp cut from the inside of her lungs as ‘malignant’. A clean, unassuming set of letters that so eloquently spells out the word ‘metastasized’ like it were a simple thing, to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Timeline:** Immediately following _Avengers: Age of Ultron_. The only difference in Marvel Cinematic/Television/Netflix canon is that Simmons did not get sucked into the obelisk at the end of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2 finale. See the end of the chapter for an illustrated ([slightly modified](http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/5395/A-Marvel-Cinematic-Universe-Timeline/)) timeline of the Marvel universe in relation to this fic.

“Well do I know that I am mortal, a creature of one day. But if my mind follows the winding paths of the stars, then my feet no longer rest on Earth, but standing by Zeus himself I take my fill of ambrosia, the divine dish.” ― Ptolemy

\--

“How long?” she asks her oncologist. Dr. Wilcox is a middle-aged man with white-peppered temples and a warm bedside manner that makes her feel almost guilty for hating him.

“Six months,” he says and there is something inside Jane that shatters. A crystalline break that splinters and fractures up and out from the heart of her. She wants to scream, or cry, or rage against the calm demeanor of Dr. Wilcox. How dare he? How could he? What had she done to deserve this, to warrant a death sentence?

And science is the one who hands it to her so neatly. The order of her medical file alarms her, lab tests with white cell counts and percentages and biopsy results that positively declare the polyp cut from the inside of her lungs as ‘malignant’. A clean, unassuming set of letters that so eloquently spells out the word ‘metastasized’ like it were a simple thing, to die.

And all at once, she finds the fires of her rage have extinguished. All that bitterness and indignation at her impending death has dried up. _It would have been better to be angry_ , she thinks. That had always come so naturally to her. To fight, to struggle, to overcome... it’s who she is. But this, this blank chasm where her fury should have been, is terrifying.

“I see,” she says and feels nothing. Not the fear of impending death, not the pain of her body turning on itself, not even the anger of lost time. She is blank; empty. Just a nondescript vessel that contains no thought or will. She is adrift, hollow.

She thinks maybe she’s broken. She imagines an old windowpane splitting, a crack that creeps out in both directions like a living thing. The jagged edges where the glass gives way and grinds against itself, the cause of its own demise. She is cracked, splintering like old sheet glass under the stress of an unbearable load. She is detached from this moment, like recalling a memory rather than forming it.

She thinks of her parents. She remembers their funeral. She was 22. Erik held her hand as they lowered the caskets, as if she would have thrown herself after them if he didn’t. Maybe she would have. Would he hold Darcy’s hand this time?

“Would you like to ask me any questions?” Dr. Wilcox asks and the only thing she can think of is her project. The half complete prototype of a practical Einstein-Rosen bridge she’s been working on for the past five years. She struggles to pull her mind away from her current dilemma of how to control the repulsive spin of fermion particles long enough for it to reach a critical density so it can rebound and open the other end of the wormhole. She hasn’t figured out how to direct the warped spacetime to open at particular coordinates yet, and she wants to ask Dr. Wilcox if he thinks she can solve it in six months. But she doesn’t.

“No,” she says instead, gathering her coat and standing. “Thank you,” she says and thinks maybe that isn’t the correct response to being told you’re going to die.

“We need to discuss your treatment options,” Dr. Wilcox stammers when he realizes she means to leave. And she almost feels bad for him, for not doing what he thinks she should.

“Of course,” she says, already heading towards the door. It’s raining outside. She can see the rivets of water trailing down his windows like the cracks she imagines inside her. “Tomorrow?” she asks with no intention letting him refuse.

“Uh… yes. Tomorrow, that will be fine,” he lies and she wonders if she’s inconvenienced him with her death.

He walks her out, the mask of his calm professionalism faltering only once when he asks his receptionist to make room for her tomorrow. Jane feels bad because she knows she won’t come. She should tell him not to bother, but she doesn’t.

Right now, she wants to walk. She doesn’t have an umbrella so she wraps herself in her coat, like armor, and braves out into the spring rain.

\--

She finds herself at her lab. She’s not really surprised; there’s nowhere else for her to go, really. She has a small room on this remote S.H.I.E.L.D. base, but her whole life is in this lab. These four walls lined with metal-topped work tables, scattered with bits and pieces of projects. She still fiddles with engineering; not that she needs to cobble together instruments anymore, since her involvement with Thor and S.H.I.E.L.D. resulted in proper funding. But she finds that it relaxes her, allows her mind to wander like most people do as they fall asleep or in the shower. She’s been working on a scanning electron microscope for the past few months, careful to machine each piece to her specifications and CAD designs. Maybe she can donate it to Culver’s physics department when she dies.

She thinks maybe she should call someone, Erik or Darcy or Thor. But she can’t bring herself to. Right now she just wants to tinker and forget about the cancer that’s killing her and the quantum entanglement problem that she can’t seem to _think_ her way out of. Right now, there is just her hands and what she builds. There is no need for thought.

\--

“How?” Erik asks that night when she finally gets home and manages to call him. She can hear the pain in his voice so clearly. She’s almost glad she doesn’t have to do this in person. She’s sure she wouldn’t be able to hold it together if she had to look him in the eye and tell him she’s dying.

“They don’t know, but I suspect it was the Æther.” It’s the first time she’s managed to put a name to the fear that’s been slowly eating away at her. “I can’t think of any other way I could have been exposed to enough radiation to cause so much damage.” She can feel her artificial mask of indifference slipping. “Erik,” she sobs, and feels the weight of it press into her. “I’m scared.”

“Oh, Jane. Janey, I’ll be there tomorrow,” he says and she sobs harder.

“I’m sorry, I know you’re busy.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters, just you. Janey, I’m so sorry.” She can hear him crying and that alone is enough to break her again. She hasn’t allowed herself to cry, to really let herself feel it. She pushed it away, kept the pain at arm’s length while she theorized on what particles she might use as fermions for the bridge. She thought of summers with her parents in North Carolina, she thought of Thor when he looked at her over a bonfire and unraveled the mysteries of the universe. She thought of anything she could to distract her. But now that she’s confessed, now that Erik knows, it feels real, in a way it didn’t before. And she’s scared. She angry and scared and desperate.

“Maybe,” she hiccups, clutching her phone tightly, “maybe Thor knows a way…” She lets the end of the thought flicker out in her mind, like the fading to black at the end of a movie. It feels like cheating, like asking for preferential treatment. She knows no one else dying of cancer gets to ask an alien for help. But she’s selfish. She doesn’t want to die. “Oh God,” she cries. “I don’t want to die!”

\--

Thor shows up at her door at 4:17 AM. He’s out of breath from running and Jane flings herself into his arms. “Jane. Oh, Jane,” Thor says into her hair as he holds her close. She doesn’t ask how he knows. Fury or Erik, either is likely. “I would have come sooner,” he apologizes and Jane shakes her head.

“It’s okay, you’re here now.” She knows the reason his voice breaks, she knows the shame that accompanies his apology. He didn’t come sooner because he _couldn’t_.

~~

After the battle with Ultron, he’d been desperate to return home. Something about what he saw in that cave terrified him. But before he could leave, Director Fury told him he had information that might help. He led Thor to a secure room and showed him a prophecy, nearly a thousand years old, about the end of the world.

Ragnarök, it was called. The end of days. And Thor was going to be the cause of it.

Discovering that he would be to blame for the death of billions, of whole worlds being destroyed, Thor lost the ability to wield Mjölnir. So there it sat, in some S.H.I.E.L.D. stronghold, unable to be lifted. Even Vision, after taking the life of Ultron (because as far as Vision was concerned, Ultron was just as much alive as he was), was no longer able to lift the mighty hammer. Thor confessed all of it to her that night. He’d wept and screamed and accused Fury of purposefully manipulating him into becoming _unworthy_.

He was suspicious of everyone, as if there had been some kind of plan to steal his hammer. He worried Captain America might take it from him, or Fury would set up a rotating line of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents to try their hand at lifting Mjölnir.

“I’m sure it’s not like that,” she insisted, but he was too buried in his own grief to see the truth of it.

“They mean to make me weak, to steal my power!” She knew his fear grew from his own insecurities but she didn’t know how to comfort him. “Let them try. There are none on Midgard capable of wielding Mjölnir.”

“Would it be so bad?” she asked. “If someone else could lift it, wouldn’t they help?”

“I will kill anyone who tries to take it from me!” he declared and Jane sent a silent plea to the universe that it would never come to that. She wondered how many times he’s tried to lift it, how many times he had to walk away. He was still an Asgardian, unlike when he was sent to earth as a mortal. He has all the same strength and power he always did, just without the glittering armor, cape, and hammer.

Jane ached for him, for the pain she knew it caused. He’d lost his mother and his brother in the last few years and now Mjölnir too seemed to be gone from his grasp. His faithful companion. Even Jane had grown fond of his hammer in the last few years.

She’d taken to speaking to it, when no one else was around. When Thor left it in her care, as he often did when there was no fighting to be had. In the year and a half since Malekith was destroyed he chose to stay on Earth, with Jane. Home hurt too much then, with all his long memories. He didn’t wish to be king, and with his father’s permission he was free live on Midgard.

There were raids, of course, searching for Loki’s scepter and finding Hydra agents. But Thor became almost a consultant to S.H.I.E.L.D. He taught them about the nine realms, like he did for her in New Mexico. When he was doing _diplomatic_ things he always left Mjölnir with Jane. Either in her lab or apartment. It became such a fixture in her life, and the way Thor spoke about it, as if it were a living thing, Jane found herself speaking to it too.

Working alone for so long, she developed the habit of speaking aloud. It was a natural progression to speak _to_ someone, or as situation would have it, to _something_. And there was the way Mjölnir seemed to hum. When it was quiet and no one else was around, Jane could feel the vibrations of it in her fingertips, running the length of her spine.

Thor had told her, once, that it was ‘forged in the heart of a dying star’. Which was very poetic, of course. But she couldn’t help but think maybe it was more than that. If it was forged _of_ the heart of a dying star - aka a neutron star - as some had suggested, [3] that would imply it weighed an inconceivable amount.

But Jane, unlike others, had been close enough to it to know that it wasn’t _heavy_ so much as _unmovable_. She also knew it was made from Uru, a metal alloy only known to Asgard, since she had an ‘in’ with the prince and all.

But given its size and weight, acquired when she asked Thor to _rest_ it on a scale, she was also able to calculate its density at 2.13 grams/cm3, which was lighter than aluminum. Making it, most definitely, not a material known to humans. In fact, the only substance Jane even knew of, in theory, that could explain the strength and density of Mjölnir was metallic hydrogen.[4] Modern scientific theory proposed the existence of metallic hydrogen at the core of some planets, like Jupiter. But it had yet to be produced in a lab, due to the massive amounts of pressure required.[5]

So, if ‘Uru’ _was_ metallic hydrogen, then perhaps the lore of how it was forged was more accurate than she’d first thought. The heat and pressure required to forge metallic hydrogen would be immense. Where better than the center of a planetary nebula,[6] where the spent core of a star collapsed under its own weight?

Which still left her with the mystery of _how_ Thor was able to lift it when no one else could. In the end, Jane theorized that perhaps Mjölnir could modulate its atomic frequency to be in or out of phase with certain individuals. So it wasn’t that Thor was able to lift it, it was that Mjölnir was allowing Thor to do so. She still wasn’t sure how a hammer was able to _decide_ to do anything, but she also accepted ~~,~~ a long time ago ~~,~~ that there were going to be parts of his world that she would never fully comprehend.

She told Mjölnir her theory once. She listened to the steady hum, felt it more than heard it, in her teeth and skull. Certain ultrasonic frequencies were known to cause hallucinations and invoke a sense of dread and doom in humans. She wondered if Mjölnir’s pitch could also fluctuate. Radiating either ruin or salvation depending on who it sensed was around. She asked if it liked her, if that was why she always felt calmed by its hum.

“Would you let me pick you up?” she asked, touching her finger to the worn leather of its sturdy grip. She never tried, of course. She was never sure what was more frightening, that she wouldn’t be able to or that she _would_.

 _Not a question I need to know the answer to_ , Natasha had said before Ultron attacked. Thor told her about it when he recounted each Avenger’s trials with the hammer. He thought it was a strange response, but secretly Jane understood.

~~

She thinks about Mjölnir as Thor holds her. She misses it; it's soft, reassuring hum. She thinks about asking him to take her to see it. She mourns it like she does everyone else in her life. She wonders if she’ll ever see Thor hold it again, before she dies.

“Do you truly think this could be the will of the Æther?” Thor asks and Jane wishes he could still fly. She would so like to see the stars tonight.

“I guess it doesn’t matter now,” Jane shrugs and looks away from his naked concern.

“Come with me, to Asgard. There is…” His words falter and he looks shockingly young. “There is a way to save you yet,” he finishes vaguely. But Jane already knows what he means. She’s thought of little else all night. She’d laid wide awake in bed, imagining those shining golden apples with their promise of immortality. But she can’t decide if that’s what she really wants. To live forever? To watch Erik and Darcy and everyone she’s ever known or loved grow old and die while she stays so utterly unchanged? It’s not something they’ve ever discussed before, the possibility of _forever_.

Frankly whenever Jane had considered it in the past, it scared the shit out of her. Of course it was tempting to see the world evolve, to have eternity to learn the secrets of the universe. What amazing discoveries would she be able to live to see, to find for herself? Was it worth it? Was it what she wanted? Those were questions that kept her awake at 4:17 in the morning.

“I’m not ready for that just yet,” she tells him, and this is the clearest she’s thought all night. This is not the hysteria of when she’d spoken with Erik or the numbness of this afternoon in Dr. Wilcox’s office. “I can still fight,” she says and takes his hand. That, at least, is a sentiment he will understand. Even if he can’t appreciate the _why_ of it.

 _I’m human_ , she wants to say. She wants to explain that it’s important. She is Dr. Jane Foster, of Midgard. Daughter of Dr. James Foster and Dalia Malka. When she dies she’s going to be buried next to her mother and father. She doesn’t understand _why_ it’s important, just that it _is_.

“You are strong, Jane Foster. If you say you will fight it, I have little doubt that it will be so.”

“Thank you,” she whispers. “Not just for this, but for everything. Thank you for crashing into my back yard, for teaching me about other worlds, for fighting to save this one. Thank you.” She wants to explain about how the world gets bigger, about her epiphanies. She wants to tell him about stargazing and dyeing flowers. She wants to explain that the day she kissed him in New Mexico the world got _so much bigger_. But how could she explain that? How could she explain the sensation of stretching, of endless wonder and mysteries and the unknowable, inscrutable expanse of space getting just a little bit bigger when she realized everything he’d told her was true? How could she make him understand that it's what she lives _for_?

“No, it is I who is indebted. I would have been lost without you, Jane. I am lost now and look how I turn to you. If there is anything I can do, you will tell me?” he asks, and she can see the truth of what he says. He loves her, she knows that now. She just wishes he’d said so sooner. Now it feels like it's too late. She worries about him anchoring himself to her sinking ship. She doesn’t want to drown him too.

“Yes,” she lies. She already knows she won’t go to Asgard. She will die on this pale blue dot, just like every other human who’s ever existed. “Read to me?” she asks him, her voice small and sad. She knows he won’t deny her this.

She hands him a Richard Feynman book. The tragic irony of it will be lost on him, she knows. But she’s always found comfort in Feynman’s writing and his voice. If she is to die, it will be on her terms. She is resolute on that.

Tomorrow she will get up and go to work and crack the fermion problem. Then she will move on to the next problem. She still has six months, and she’s going to make them count. She’s going to finish her life’s work. She will create the first stable, transversable, man-made wormhole. She owes it to herself, to her father, to Erik, to Thor. This is what she was put on this planet to do with her short, limited life. It is her destiny.

\--

“I’d like to keep this quiet,” Jane tells Director Fury via video conference. She’d requested the meeting first thing this morning.

“Not a problem.” He nods and she wonders if he feels bad for her. Probably not. He’d seen enough death to be unphased by now, certainly. “What can I do?”

“I want to keep working. I’ll have one round of chemo, but that’s it. I don’t want to be so weak from chemo that I can’t work. I’m going to finish the Einstein-Rosen bridge.” Her tone leaves no room for ambiguity. She will _not_ allow them to take this from her. “If possible, I’d like to bring in Dr. Erik Selvig and my old lab assistant, Darcy Lewis. I know Erik is assigned to another project and Darcy doesn’t have clearance, but if…” Jane falters. Her carefully rehearsed speech sticks in her throat. “If I die before I can finish, I want to know I’m leaving it in the best possible hands,” she manages to grit out. “I’ll also need access to your top particle physicists and quantum engineers.”

“Done,” he says and nods to someone off camera. “Agent Maria Hill will assist you with any personnel or materials requisitions.”

“Thank you, Director Fury,” she says. “Not just for allowing me to continue my research and for funding me, but for the medical care and believing in me.” It hasn’t always been the best relationship between her and S.H.I.E.L.D., but it has been a productive one. And she’s grateful for that.

“Thank you, Dr. Foster,” Director Fury says and there is something in his inflection that makes her throat catch and she has to turn away. Her monitor goes black and she spends a few minutes trying to compose herself before she can order her thoughts enough to make a plan.

She needs to get Erik up to speed on the project, and make sure that she has adequate documentation and notes in case he needs them. She’ll need to scan her notebook, and anything else she does should be recorded digitally. She makes a list of things she needs. Four tablets, new computers, a bigger lab, testing facilities, materials experts, Tony Stark.

By the time she’s done with the list there’s a knock on her lab and Agent Hill sticks her head in. “Dr. Foster,” she greets.

“There will be more,” she warns when she hands Agent Hill her list.

“Tony Stark?” she asks, her eyes skimming her list.

“I need an arc reactor, probably bigger than he’s ever made. It would also be nice to be able to ask him some questions every now and then, like a consultant,” she explains.

“Ah.” Agent Hill nods. “I’ll get to work.”

\--

Erik arrives late that night, jetlagged and red-eyed. The first thing he does is hug her so tightly her back cracks. It’s almost surreal, the way they bounce from one topic to the next. They cry together. He let’s her yell and scream and sob the way she hasn’t been able to yet. They talk about work and allow themselves to get lost in logistics and theories. That’s easier. She is more familiar with those kinds of conversations. They talk about Thor and Mjölnir, Asgard and immortality. Jane admits that although she doesn’t want to die _now_ she is certain that she wants to die. Erik nods because he understands what Thor can’t. They are human. It is in their nature to die. He tells her that he loves her, that he’s proud of her. He promises they will succeed, and she makes him swear to continue her work if she dies.

And so, they begin the business of rewriting physics. Jane has already laid most of the foundation for her revised theory of relativity. She finds peace in it. In knowing that while she was ostracized and marginalized for her ‘fringe,’ radical theories, in the end, she will be proven right. Maybe they’ll name a theory after her.

‘The Foster Theory’ has a nice ring to it.

She finally sees Dr. Wilcox again. Darcy goes with her. She is scheduled for her first (and last) round of chemo.

Days bleed into weeks, and weeks into months. Jane can feel time, like it were a physical thing, pressing down on her. She is always aware of it; there is a countdown inside her the likes of which she has never known. At any given point, she is aware of _how much time she has left_.

She starts skipping meals. Eating seems like a useless exercise, especially considering she throws it up anyway. She gets IV nutrients once a week now. Her hair begins to fall out a week after her first treatment. She stares at her pillow in the morning, or the hair she finds in her drain, or in her brush. She shaves it off the next day.

Then the rumors start. She hears whispers in the halls, one jittery intern to another in the science common area. They know she’s sick; she makes no effort to hide it. Erik buys her a paisley scarf when she complains.

“I don’t care about my hair,” she protests.

“No, but they do,” Erik says and Jane grumbles a thanks and ties the scarf around her head.

Darcy is just about the only one who doesn’t treat her differently. She steals food off Jane’s uneaten trays and tells her the scarf is giving off ‘creepy cat lady’ vibes. She flirts with Jane’s engineer tech and asks about her and Thor’s sex life.

“I bet it’s wild,” she says and takes a bite of Jane’s pilfered apple. The sight of it makes her stomach turn. She had another treatment yesterday and can’t stand the sight of food today.

It’s good, as good as she can hope for. She has good days, where she finally manages to test a theory on particle spin and settle on an inorganic alloy as the fermion particle. She knows it needs to be unusually stable. Tony suggests a combination of Vibranium and his new element. It doesn’t have an official name, so S.H.I.E.L.D. researchers call it Ironmanium jokingly. Jane wonders if the name will stick. She’ll probably be dead before the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry get their act together enough to make it official.

Jane calls her alloy Vironmanium.

It’s four months before she’s able to successfully test the quantum entanglement of Vironmanium’s fermion. She watches with bated breath as her lab tests a half reverse spin on a single molecule which is imitated perfectly on an identical molecule in another lab.

She’s too exhausted to celebrate so Thor heats her up some chicken broth and reads to her about Valhöll from one of Erik's old Norse mythology textbooks. It’s become their ritual since she was diagnosed. She feels guilty sometimes, like she’s keeping him from more important things. Like going home.

“Nonsense, Jane. I am fortunate to spend time with you.”

She’s not sure how to categorize what they are to each other anymore. She loves him, but she doesn’t think she’s _in_ love with him. Maybe she hasn’t been for a long time, even before she was diagnosed. She doesn’t think he’s in love with her either. But she doesn’t want to be alone, and she thinks he might view it as cowardly if she told him to go home.

It’s hard to be herself around him, she realizes one day. She’s careful how she acts, not to be too angry or sad or depressed. She wants to be strong for him, wants him to look back on her with fondness, with pride. He will have a long life with which to remember her, and she doesn’t want the lasting impression to be of a bitter, angry, jealous girl who was too stubborn to ask for a miracle. She wants to be brave, smart, compassionate Jane who, even though she’s dying, still lends him her strength when he’s unable to lift his own hammer.

\--

It isn’t until almost five months that everything falls apart. She’s working. She feels like she’s always working. She doesn’t have another choice. The chemo stopped months ago, and she has to be careful not to take too many pain meds. She doesn’t want it to interfere with her work. She stopped sleeping about a month ago. She gets about two hours of sleep a night, except for when she passses out from exhaustion about once a week.

Tonight is one of those nights where she looks up and it’s one in the morning. She considers going home, crawling into bed with Thor and listening to his steady, even breathing. But she feels her time slipping away. Every second she isn’t working is a second wasted. Darcy and Erik try to keep up, but they don’t have a countdown like she does.

Tonight she is alone, revising some of the power requirements for the Einstein-Rosen bridge device (ERBD for short). They’ve gotten some promising results from the Vironmanium and creating enough critical mass for their experiments to now be taking place off site in a vacuum chamber. The arc reactor should arrive tomorrow, and Jane is eager to test the criticality of their fermion particle.

The basic tenement of her theory is if she can just funnel enough energy into the reaction, she will be able to create a super-dense blob of these particles. Then by passing them through an insanely powerful superconductor, the magnetic field will force the particles into a half reverse spin. Which will be duplicated in the single molecule of identical particle on the other end of the chamber that will allow for an outlet once the mass reaches a finite point of maximum density before its gravity well collapses in on itself. That will tear a hole through spacetime, which will (hopefully) be connected to the clone particle long enough to create a stable, traversable wormhole.

She knows she probably won’t live long enough for practical or human testing, but if she can at least create a stable, repeatable, predictable event, she thinks she will be able to die happy.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Until S.H.I.E.L.D. is attacked.

The sound of the alarm is deafening. Jane tries to cover her ears and think of what she should do. She’s supposed to head for the emergency exit; she’s done enough drills to know that. But she can’t. The thought of someone taking her work, just when they’re so close, makes her fume. So instead of escaping, like any sane person would, she locks the lab door, turns off all the monitors, and takes a laptop into the dark supply closet. From there she instructs all her servers to back up to the remote S.H.I.E.L.D. Network Operations Center, then reformat. It’s a simple command, but her hands shake so violently she has a hard time with it.

Eventually, she does it and leaves the laptop open on a shelf. She thinks of the printed diagrams and specs she left on the counter. Making a rash decision, she quickly runs back into the lab, sweeping any papers she finds into one of the big, wheeling trash cans. She throws in the models and her notebooks too. She knows they have everything backed up digitally, but she hesitates to destroy it. She can only think of burning it, but she’s worried that might set off more alarms or the smell of smoke might draw unwanted attention. In the end, she wheels the trash can across the hall and puts it into the machine shop’s shower-sized CNC. It’s not perfect, but she hopes it will be safe enough.

Her heart is pounding, and she feels like she’s going to be sick. Jane steadies herself against a desk when she exits the CNC, trying to get her bearings. But her foot slips and she falls; a desk chair clatters to the floor behind her.

No sooner than 30 seconds later, before Jane even has time to get up, she hears shouting and gunfire and sees the erratic swish of flashlights in the dark. They’re coming down the hall, headed straight for her.

She crawls out the far door and makes a break for the emergency exit she should have gone to as soon as she heard the alarm. But before she can make it down the hall (her gait is sluggish and shambling) she feels a sharp crack to the back of her head. Then the world goes dark. Her last thought is of her father, the way his eyes would sparkle when he looked at the stars. It’s not a bad way to die, she thinks.

\--

Mjölnir was aware of the passage of time, the long stretch of metered existence between one charge and the next. In all its long life, there has seldom been occurrence for it to be this solitary. Mjölnir found that it did not like the chill under this mountain or the hostility that engulfed this realm. It itched to feel the warm touch of flesh to its handle, to sync with a being worthy in might and strength. The quiet cold made it quiver to be held again.

This has been the second time the boy-king, named so after Mjölnir’s own title of worth, has laid it down. Never so has it been tied to such a fickle wielder. Mjölnir felt him still, a light presence on the edge of its senses. There was a familiarity there, a fondness forged in the heat of battles past. Mjölnir enjoyed its time in his possession, took pride in its amazing feats. But that remembrance has turned bitter after being trapped in the dark for so long.

Mjölnir sat in the same place he was last set to rest while he turned himself against it. For it wasn’t Mjölnir that turned away from him, but rather the man who judged himself to be unworthy and could not overcome the terror in his own soul. The fear that crept in, like a dark thing, writhing and polluting it until he could not budge Mjölnir in the slightest.

It longs for days remembered. The light of other worlds, the call of the elements, the electricity of lightning. That is its purpose, its design. Since its creation, forged by the hands of dwarven blacksmiths from uru, it has only ever known glory. Imbued with an innate sense of worth, Mjölnir has judged a long line of kings and gods alike. It could see past the surface, into the heart of those it judged. Where some hid darkness or worse, an empty void.

Mjölnir sought the bright light of purity within a soul. It could sense the bearers’ fears and intent with only a glancing touch. Once judged, it never forgot a soul. There have been so few worthy of Thor’s power. Its last liege was from a long line of royal wielders of the power of Thor. There was Odin, a heavy hand who preferred brute force to the summoning of the elements. Before that had been Borr, a savage ruler fit only for times of war. And before that was Búri, a man with a more gentle touch that was so favored in times of peace.

There had been others too, but Mjölnir’s tenure in their care was not so long or memorable. It acted as the will of kings for many thousands of years, so those who held it only once were pushed aside in its memory.

At the present, Mjölnir hummed in remembrance of her soft words, the mortal it was often left in the care of. She had a calming energy, a stillness to her soul that made it yearn for her. For she was the only mortal that ever spoke to it. She discussed her magic and puzzled at its resistance to those who it did not wish to lift it. It was such a rarity, to be cherished not by its wielder but by his lover. She treated Mjölnir like a confidant, an entity capable of imparting will and acting on its agency.

There had been others, before her, who suspected such things. But they did so with agenda, those who wished to subjugate the mighty Mjölnir (as if such a thing were possible) or _trick_ it into favor. Its namesake’s brother had tried it often in their youth. A jealous boy who coveted his brother’s birthright.

Mjölnir saw the truth of the boy long before he himself learned of his true parentage. Mjölnir pitied him, for the boy had always assumed his inability to lift it was somehow a matter of his father’s love. He could not see that it was the darkness that came from within that it viewed with distaste. It was a fault of his own making, a lacking confidence that he looked to blame on others that Mjölnir could not tolerate. It was not because of what he was no more than his brother’s unworthiness stemmed from _his_ ancestry.

Race and creed had never made a difference to Mjölnir. It valued soul above all else. That naked, fragile heart of all living things that it could read. There had been many it judged to be fit, if only they’d had the will. The new being, created by the sad man encased in metal, had shone brightly in Mjölnir’s periphery since his birth. But after he’d taken a life his soul turned sour, a speck of dark that spoiled its good opinion of him. Which left little else in the way of prospects, now that the god proved to be unfit.

While Mjölnir felt a time would come in the future, when they might once again be reunited, now was not that time. It was just and right, as only it could arbitrate, but that did not mean that it did not yearn for the next Thor.

This left only an unlikely ally. The fragile woman Mjölnir had come to think so fondly of in the dark: Jane Foster.

\--

Mjölnir wakes from sleep, restless and alert. It can sense danger near, a malicious intent that radiates down long, dark corridors. But it cannot see clearly past the barrier of the room it is trapped in. Abandoned by its previous wielder, it is alone.

It is aware of others, strangers to it in the dark. They are horrid creatures, twisted and gross in their hatred and cruelty. There are none among them that Mjölnir would ever consider tuning itself to. There is a battle waging; blood has spilled this night.

Angered by its ineffectual prison, Mjölnir comes to life the instant it recognizes the bright light of her soul, the mortal it has come to love. Jane Foster is in need of aid.

She is much changed since its last encounter with her. No longer is she calm and silent. Her body is poisoned and diseased and her heart shines brightly in the dark. A beacon that Mjölnir yearns to be tethered to.

\--

Jane wakes up in the dark. There is an ache in her side and a throbbing in her head. Her hands are unbound and she lies on the cold floor. She can hear voices speaking.

“Is that her?” one of the men ask.

“What happened to her?” another asks.

“She’s sick,” someone says with disgust.

“She reformatted all the hard drives in the lab. We’ll have to take her.”

And her heart sinks. Thor is not here. She doesn’t hear any more gunfire which she worries means the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have been killed. And suddenly she’s fucking pissed.

She has not endured five months of chemo and borderline malnutrition working on this bridge just so some Hydra assholes can take it from her. This is hers, damnit. They can kill her if they want, but there is no way she will allow them to take this.

She listens carefully to the scuff of feet, trying to guess how far from her they are. She hears a rolling chair move and keys being typed.

“Fuck,” one of them curses, “where’s all the models?”

Jane can see a glimmer of red light through her shut eyelids, and she knows she has to be near the far exit. If they’re looking for models at her workstation that means she has at least six feet between her and them.

Her heart pounding, she doesn’t think she’s going to get a better opportunity. So she steels her nerves, takes a deep breath, and runs.

\--

“Shit, she’s awake! Stop her!” Jane can hear them shouting behind her. But she’s too slow. Her legs ache and her lungs feel like they’re on fire. She is too slow to win this race. She tries to calm her mind and think about options. She is alone, weak, and slow.

That’s when she hears it, a hum.

It’s a familiar resonance that she hasn’t heard in months.

“Mjölnir!” she cries, so shocked to _feel_ it's reassuring hum vibrate through her chest. That means it's close by. “Oh, please,” she begs, “I don’t want to die.”

She throws her hand out, beseeching. And she prays, every bit as fervently as a devote believer. She prays that she’s worthy.

_Please. Please. Please. Please._

She thinks it over and over. Begs her soul to be worthy. _Just this once_ , she bargains. _I don’t want to die!_

\--

She calls to it, asks for help. She is scared, but even faced with death her soul is as bright and illustrious as ever. She has not dulled with petty rage or dimmed from dark sorrow. She calls its name, and long since has it waited for the day she would summon it.

Without hesitation, Mjölnir rises and flings itself to her. The paltry shield that encased its tomb these long months shatters like brittle glass. There is nothing that can keep it from her.

The new Thor. Jane Foster.

\--

Jane doesn’t have time to worry that maybe it won’t work or she’ll be too weak. Almost the instant she flings her hand out, in askance, a great force slams into her waiting palm. The force of it rocks her, swings her back on her heels and radiates down, spreading like a wildfire in her veins. She knows this sensation, though she has not been acquainted with it for a long time. It’s strength.

She doesn’t have time to dwell on her changed appearance because someone is attacking her from behind. A man, who seems small and sad, now that Jane can _feel_ the power of Mjölnir coursing through her. He is like a gnat. She swats him with her hammer and steps neatly over his crumpled body. She feels no guilt at taking his life. She knows evil when she sees it.

She learned from Thor, watching him swing the hammer and call down lightning. She knows the power she now wields, and does so not with vengeance or spite. She swings her hammer with conviction, with purpose. She will drive these men back and down. She must save those she can, and protect her research.

In almost no time at all, they are dead. Like crushed leaves beneath her boot, they are little more than refuse.

There are more of them. Mjölnir directs her senses upward. She can hear distant screaming and a thud like a tree falling. She aims Mjölnir and commands it to fly. Her wrist caught in the leather loop, she grips the handle and it carries her swiftly through empty corridors and up a flight of stairs, directly into a waging battle.

She sees several S.H.I.E.L.D. agents pinned down, taking potshots from around a wall at the end of hall. And there, in the middle of the chaos and din, is Thor. He’s shirtless, and still wears his soft sleeping pants. He must have heard the alarm and come for her. He doesn’t have a weapon, so he swings a metal table through the narrow hall, sweeping masked men off their feet and sending them smashing into walls.

His eyes lock on her with alarming anger. In her grip, Mjölnir can sense her fear but does not abandon her when Thor reaches his hand out, calling to it. Jane watches in horror as Thor’s rage is tunneled at her. The rest of the assailants fall in his wake as he charges at her.

His first hit is to her face and she is sent flying backwards, cracking into the drywall next to the stairwell door.

She doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to fight him but she also knows he won’t let her keep Mjölnir. She can still recall the desperate rage all those months ago when he said he’d kill whoever tried to take it from him.

“Who are you?” he demands, charging for another attack. This time she’s ready for him.

Mjölnir pulls her to the side to dodge his fist. There is just a glancing blow that deflects off her faceplate. It’s then that she realizes Mjölnir has crafted her armor as glorious and strong as Thor’s was. And her face has been covered by a helmet. She sends a silent thanks to it, for protecting her identity.

She vows now, that she will not reveal herself to him. It’s selfish of her, but she doesn’t want him to look back on her and their time spent together when she is nothing but bones and feel resentment for her part in his self-imposed exile.

To that end, and with the mask to help, she decides to disguise her voice as well. “A friend,” she announces in her best approximation of a British accent. “I have not stolen Mjölnir.”

“You dare speak its name!?” he screams and she has to stop herself from rolling her eyes. He is nothing if not predictable.

He charges at her again and she easily sidesteps him. She doesn’t want to fight, but she also doesn’t want to get punched in the face again by a god. He growls in frustration.

“Fight me, you coward!” he roars and slams her face into the wall of the narrow hall. And there is something in her that snaps. Mjölnir pulses a violent rage as she tears herself from his grip and her fist makes contact with his ribs. Then, before he has time to react, she swipes his legs with Mjölnir, sending him careening down the hall in a half-spin. He grunts from his place on the ground and she smirks.

“You will regret that,” he warns, rising slowly.

She doesn’t give him another chance to attack. “Enough,” she announces as she pins him to the wall with Mjölnir resting snugly against his chest. “Calm thyself down, Thor.”

There is something like anguish in his eyes and he looks away. “I am no longer Thor,” he says miserably, as all the fight drains from his face. “‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor,’” he quotes, his tone fragile and raw. “I am no longer worthy of it. But I am still a prince of Asgard. I am still the Odinson, oh Mighty Thor.” He inclines his head, in something like a surrender and she is left reeling.

She feels a tugging in Mjölnir, something she doesn’t know how to process. A grief, perhaps, at being cast aside. “What? No!” her accent falters in her horror. “I didn’t, that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t ask for this. The hammer called to me. I only did what needed to be done. I never--”

“That hammer has the power to destroy worlds, or to save them. Carry it well, Thor.” And then he is gone, stalking down the hall, picking through the mangled bodies of Hydra agents.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  [3] <https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/298856970180505600>  
> [4] <https://news.ncsu.edu/2013/02/wms-mjolnir/>  
> [5] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallic_hydrogen>  
> [6] <https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/hubble-sees-a-dying-stars-final-moments>


	4. Chapter 2: Testing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The stars are so close and so bright that she feels like she's walking among them. Like maybe if she just reached out a hand, she would be able to graze her fingertips against the black, velvet curtain of night. And she yearns for it, like it were a tangible thing. The universe seems small in comparison to the swelling in her chest and the ache in her heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You might recognize a few of the lines from The Might Thor comic, I try to use them only sparingly and when suited to the narrative.

“I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” ― Sarah Williams[7]

\--

When Jane wakes up, she’s in the hospital. She doesn’t remember how she got there or when. The last thing she does remember is fighting with Thor and him storming off. She is sure he was on his way to find her, so she flew back down the stairwell she’d come up, which was thankfully the opposite direction he’d headed. That gave her a more direct path to her labs so she had enough time to get back to where she’d been tied up and ask Mjölnir to hide before Thor made it to her. After that, everything got fuzzy. As soon as she was Jane again, she felt all the pain and fatigue return, crippling her attempts to find Thor on her own. She had a feeling she passed out somewhere in her lab.

Darcy is sitting next to her bed, playing on her phone.

“Woah there,” Darcy says as Jane immediately tries to sit up. “You were hella messed up when Thor brought you in last night. So maybe let’s save the IV pulling for later, ‘kay?”

“What happened?” she asks as Darcy lifts her motorized bed up.

“S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra, blah blah blah. Looks like they were after your research. Quick thinking with the dump and purge. Looks like they got all your models and schematics though.”

“No, they didn’t. I hid them in the machine shop CNC,” Jane informs her.

“Oh man, you’re gonna get a medal. Agent Hill or whatever was, like, freaking out. Hey, I should probably tell someone you’re awake. But oh, you missed the _best_ part!” Darcy is practically hopping now, like she can’t even contain her excitement.

“I’m cancer free!” Jane jokes and Darcy’s face goes absolutely white. “Oh, hey, Darce, I was just kidding. I know I’m still dying.” She winces at her own words. She’s not sure why she’s acting like this, but for some reason she’s angry.

“Yeah, I’ll just get someone,” Darcy mutters before she leaves the room. Jane, of course, already knows what the big news is.

There is a new Thor.

Thor had explained to her a once, when he was telling her about his father and grandfather, that ‘Thor’ was not just his name. Whoever wielded Mjölnir, not just lifted it, but wielded it - armor and all - was _Thor_. Like a King is someone who sits on a throne and wears a crown. So in that way, ‘Thor’ is a title… or a rank. She isn't sure about the nuances of the whole thing. If she knew someday _she_ would be called it, she might have paid a little more attention.

The implications of it are the same, either way.

She is the new Thor.

Her brain whirls and she feels like she might faint. She closes her eyes and lays her head back. What does this mean? Last night when she’d been sure she was going to die, she reached out, begging for Mjölnir to help her. The unasked question she’d harbored for half a decade had finally been answered.

Was she worthy?

The resounding answer, which had come not from Mjölnir’s presence in her hand but from somewhere deep inside herself, was yes. She’d always been worthy.

But what does she do now? Is she Thor? Does she want to _be_ Thor? What about _her_ Thor, Odinson? Would he forgive her? Should she tell them? Would she do it again? Should she?

As the questions mount, she waits for a sense of betrayal or dread or shame. She should feel bad for taking Mjölnir, but she doesn’t. If Thor can’t protect Earth anymore, someone should. She guesses that’ll be her now. But she also doesn’t want to tell Thor. Especially not since he’s been taking care of her these last few months. He could have gone home. Maybe he should have. But he stayed. It wasn’t just for Jane. She knows that. But he _had_ stayed, and she feels like she owes him for that.

So, guilty enough to hide her face and lie, but not guilty enough to stop.

Jane wonders at the maze of her own mind. How does she know she is worthy? Has she always known? Has Thor? Has Mjölnir? At the thought of it, there is a pull in her mind, a connection she feels like the slow trickle of water. Instinctively, she knows if she were to focus on the sensation, pull it to her, Mjölnir would come to her again.

She wants to. She misses the strength. Right now she feels small and frail and empty. She wants that feeling again. She is curious where it’s gone to hide. She thinks maybe she’s allowed to ask.

She experiences a terrible sense of vertigo as she _feels_ her consciousness being pulled across the space between them.

The moon. Mjölnir is on the moon.

Well, as far as hiding places go, it’s a good one. How long did it take to get there? About four hours, apparently. _Jesus_ , Jane thinks, _that’s 59,725 miles per hour. That’s almost .01% the speed of light!_

It’s not that she can _hear_ Mjölnir, not like in words. It’s more like she’s remembering something she read somewhere, like recalling the information from inside her own mind. Thor had never told her about this.

And, _oh_. That’s because he didn’t talk to Mjölnir like she does. This, for some insane reason, makes her swell with pride. She can feel an accompanying strength buoy her, like even from a great distance and in secret it is able to lend her power.

This will not sustain her forever. She already knows she’s still dying. Mjölnir knows it too. She feels bad, like she’s abandoning it.

She abruptly cuts off the trickle in her mind with Mjölnir when Thor comes in her room, followed closely by Erik, Agent Hill, and Darcy.

Jane tells them everything she can remember about wiping the system and hiding the papers. She tells them she was hit from behind and Erik tuts. She says that’s the last thing she remembers.

Erik tells her to be more careful. Agent Hill looks like she might actually hug her which is kind of terrifying. Thor is uncharacteristically quiet. She asks what happened, they fill in some blanks. A few Hydra agents snuck in; an inside man was found among the dead, and planned to take her research. When they get to the part she knows Darcy was excited to tell her, they all sort of lapse into half sentences.

“We had some help,” Agent Hill says and glances at Thor.

“Who?” Jane asks, and she tries not to feel like she’s purposefully hurting him. But he looks devastated. And the open hostility with which he glares at Agent Hill makes Jane think he suspects it was her.

“A new Thor!” Darcy blurts out, unable to contain herself anymore. “A woman Thor! Oh man, I am so excited. A few of the agents got to see her in action. They said she was amazing.” Jane doubts very much they saw her in action. Thor was too busy smashing all the bad guys in sight with a table to give her much of a chance.

“Yes, well, perhaps we’ll just leave the two of you,” Erik says, grabbing Darcy’s arm.

“What? Someone’s gotta tell her,” Darcy mumbles but doesn’t fight Erik when he leads her from the room.

“Thor?” Jane asks, trying to catch his eyes. But he recoils from his name, as if stung.

“She is Thor now. I am the Odinson,” he corrects her harshly and she can hear the resentment in his voice.

Jane reaches her hand out, palm up, asking for his hand. As soon as he sees it, he comes to her, the mask of hostility gone. “You will always be Thor to me,” she tells him gently and holds his hand.

“Tell that to Mjölnir,” he grumbles and Jane laughs. She can’t help it. He’s acting just like an upset toddler.

“Thor,” she says and glares at him when he looks like he’s going to argue. “There is no one more worthy. Be patient. Mjölnir will be back. I’m sure of it.”

“We will see, Jane Foster.” He looks like she feels.

“Darcy says you brought me here?”

She watches his face closely and sees the gambit of emotion he feels. Relief, anger, pain. “You were near death, Jane. I thought the worst had befallen you. When I heard the alarm I knew you were in trouble. I could feel it.” He takes her hand and turns it over in his larger palms. He has always treated her like a precious thing and she has loved him for it.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” she says but she hopes someday he’ll be able to hear the other apology she means it as. _I’m sorry I can’t tell you, sorry Mjölnir chose me, sorry for everything._

\--

She manages to berate the hospital staff into letting her leave that night and has Thor take her to her lab. Tony’s arc reactor has been delivered and she spends a few hours working on the power requirement calculations. She’s already been over them a million times, but she’s still worried about literally tearing a hole in the fabric of spacetime.

Tony has also reviewed her parameters, only altering the upper and lower bounds based on his experience with Ironmanium. But, as long as everything goes as planned, they will be able to start production of a larger model in an offsite NASA vacuum chamber.

She doesn’t have time to worry about Mjölnir or Hydra. Once she steps foot in her lab, there is only one truth that occupies her mind: revising the current accepted model of generalistic relativity.

\--

Once they get home, Thor sits her down, her hands in his, and tells her he must return to Asgard.

“I must speak with Father,” he tells her and Jane feels a twinge of guilt.

“Of course,” she says and touches his face, her fingers rubbing over the coarse hair of his beard. She really does love him, but she is sure now, in her heart, that she will go to her grave without yearning for him. “But when you come back,” she says, trying to keep her voice even, “we need to talk about us.”

She can see the confusion in his eyes. She knows he doesn’t want to wait. But she can’t bring herself to break up with him the day after she took Mjölnir from him. She knows that’s not really a fair comparison, but that’s what it feels like when he’s looking at her like that.

“Be well,” he says, turning into her touch, “Jane Foster.”

And it sounds so much like _goodbye_ , Jane has to look away. She doesn’t think she will see him again. He knows she is trying to free him, release him from the burden of loving her and watching her die. He knows she wants to spend what little time she has left devoted to her work, and he doesn’t blame her for that.

“Goodbye, Thor,” she whispers after he’s gone.

\--

“You _broke up_ with him!?” Darcy is yelling at her, but Jane hardly even notices. Thor left last night. She lets herself cry and curl up in bed with her Richard Feynman book and feel bad. But this morning she wakes up with a renewed sense of urgency. Not only does she have to worry about creating a viable Einstein-Rosen Bridge Device, she also, apparently, has to worry about _defending the realm_.

At all times, she is aware of Mjölnir. She knows, if she is in need, it will come to her. And now that Thor is gone, she thinks it might be a better idea to keep it a little closer than the moon. She sighs and pushes the thought aside. She will worry about that tonight, after the test.

“Busy,” Jane calls as she rechecks all her automatic safety programs. They’ve already powered up the arc reactor and run it through its paces. Tony has surpassed all of Jane’s expectations for power. She feels like she ought to thank him properly. Just another thing to add to the long list of ‘Things To Do Before I Die.’

“Jane, you can’t _dump_ a god!”

“He’s not a god, Darcy. He’s an alien.”

“Same thing!” she shouts in that shrill I’m-going-to-kill-you pitch she has sometimes. “Seriously, what are you even doing here? Shouldn’t you be out there, Living Life To The Fullest?” she asks and Jane can hear the capitalizations like a motivational poster.

“That’s what I’m trying to do, so shut up.”

“Cancer’s made you mean, Jane.” But she does finally sulk away to let Jane work.

\--

There has been a mounting pressure forming in the back of Jane’s mind for the past hour. She can feel Mjölnir getting restless.

 _Soon_ , she promises with the last of her split attention. She tries to communicate, wordlessly, and as profoundly as possible, that she needs to focus right now. And in return she feels a fresh wave of strength bolster her.

With that settled, she turns to Erik, a sly smile catching the corners of her lips. “Ready?” she asks, her mouse already hovering over the ‘Run Simulation’ button.

“As I’ll ever be,” he concedes. She knows he’s not exactly _thrilled_ about this test. In fact, if she wasn’t scheduled to die in another month, she’s sure he would tell her she’s rushing. And maybe he’s right. But she feels like she’s earned a little rushing.

This probably won’t work. She knows that. Prototype testing is notoriously flawed. And this being the first test means she is almost assured failure. There are equipment issues and code problems and unpredictable variables that always go wrong. She knows that, and yet… and yet, she is hoping it does work. She’s exhausted already, and she just wants to go home and pick up Mjölnir and feel _alive_.

“Powering up,” she announces.

One of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s best engineers just happened to be on base this past week, so Jane has been shamelessly using him to prep for the test. She’s never worked with him before, but she finds she likes his quiet attention. She heard some gossip about an accident he suffered that caused some lasting nerve damage. She doesn’t notice anything but a sharp and eager mind. “Here we go,” Leo Fitz says under his breath and bites his thumbnail.

“Approaching critical mass,” Erik says quietly. They can all see the same instrumentation readings displayed. Just monochromatic graphs that track density and spacetime fluctuations. They also have a few feeds of the test chamber running live on a separate bank of monitors, but there’s nothing to see in those yet. The heads up display in the control room is tracking each step of initialization.

There is a surge in the density chart, and for half a second all her sensors go absolutely insane. While the Vironmanium has been gaining mass and achieving the correct spin, there has been a steady rise in the number of tiny red dots on a scatter plot graph to visually track the number of particles. But as they reach critical mass, the number of red dots increase exponentially, causing a momentary flash of red that burns out the sensors.

All three of them turn their heads to another monitor she’s using to track disturbances in the gravimetric field of the lab. (Those sensors have been pilfered from the generators she and Erik had used in London during the Convergence.) They’re using the combination of the two as a crude instrument that will, theoretically, detect a tear in spacetime. And there is a horrible second where Jane can see it, see the deep puncture in the field of gravity that drags everything else around it down.

Now they’re just waiting for the quantum entanglement particle to ground the other end of the distortion and open a stable wormhole. But as she watches the monitors, there is no indication of that happening. Instead the particle spins in place, as if nothing is amiss.

“Shit,” Jane hisses half a second before the alarms in the chamber start blaring. She doesn’t even have time to hit the ‘abort’ switch on the table in front of them before her automatic safety protocols kick in and cuts power to the system. Without power, the particles should dissipate enough to close the distortion on its own. But if it doesn’t, if the tear persists, she’s not sure there’s anything they’ll be able to do.

All three of them hold their breath, waiting, watching the monitors. It takes a solid minute, which, while you’re worried you might have just destroyed the world or at the very least a multi-billion dollar secret military installation, seems like eternity. But slowly, the red begins to disappear from the scatter plot. Then there is a point where it reaches about 80% density and they just start dropping like flies.

She heaves a sigh of relief.

“Thank God,” Erik says, gripping his chest.

“That could have gone better,” Leo says in frustration.

“It could have gone worse too,” Jane reminds him and he nods.

“True. We have a bunch of data,” Leo says. “It didn’t appear to be a technical problem.”

Jane wants to snap at him that it's selfish to be glad it wasn’t _his_ fault. But she’s only mad because that means it’s _her_ fault. So she shuts up and sinks into the nearest chair she can find.

“I need to rest,” she informs Erik and casts a pleading look in his direction.

“We can finish up here. I’ll be sure to upload all the data once we get the chamber cleared.”

Jane is aware that she’s just managed to delegate the most horrible assignment to him, but there is no way she can bring herself to waste one more second on this failed experiment. “Thank you.”

\--

She practically stumbles through her front door. She’s exhausted, beyond wiped. She feels like she can’t possibly take one more step. She calls out to Mjölnir; she’s ready to pick it up now. She’s ready to forget this decrepit body of hers.

 _Please_ , she thinks.

No sooner does she think it than she finds herself cast in an otherworldly light. She watches as the enchanted armor appears, as if it had been with her all day, covering her from head to toe in something that makes her think of Thor. She checks the mirror in her bathroom, and it’s the first time she's seen herself like this.

She’d wondered why Thor hadn’t recognized her. She understands now that it isn’t just because she's wearing a mask. True, the faceplate of her helmet only leaves enough room for her eyes, but what she really sees, most of all, is the beautiful, flowing, blonde hair.

She gasps at the sight of it. With a quivering hand, she touches a few strands. It's softer than she remembers her hair, since she hasn't _had_ hair in months. This new hair is not as thick as hers had been. Oddly it reminds her of Thor’s hair. And she supposes that _shouldn't_ be odd, since she _is_ Thor now.

She marvels at the transformation. _She_ doesn't even recognize herself. She tugs on her hair, just to be sure. And she can feel the pull of it at her scalp. She laughs once, a sharp bark that signifies the beginning of her tears.

She didn't think it would matter. She never thought of herself as vain. But she's barely looked at herself in months. She still thinks of herself as she was before in her mind. And the constant reminder that she wasn't that person anymore made her turn away from her reflection. But now she gapes at herself, unable to look away.

The muscles of her arms are bulging. Not like Thor-level bulging. But this was way more muscle than she'd ever had. Unable to contain her curiosity, she removes her helmet and is surprised to find her face mostly unchanged. She'd been half expecting that to have transformed too, to _be_ someone else. But she is still herself, only now with blonde hair and blue eyes.

She imagines this might be what she would look like if she were from Asgard. A through-the-looking-glass kind of thing. Perhaps that's what Mjölnir did, alter her genetic heritage. She plucks a few strands of her golden hair, intent on running a DNA sequence, but as soon as it's pulled, it vanishes.

“Tricky,” Jane accuses the mirror. And then she catches sight of it.

The cape.

“Oh god,” she gasps. “Really?” she asks her bathroom ceiling and sighs exasperatedly.

So, aside from the muscles and hair and cape and armor, she's still herself. She finds the two familiar moles on each of her cheeks as she turns in the mirror, like she's trying to catch the illusion in a lie. But she knows this isn't a trick. She knows because she can feel it with every unlabored breath she takes.

She spends the next few hours testing her strength. Which pretty much boils down to lifting all the furniture in her apartment. Then she does it one-handed. Then she stacks some of the furniture and deadlifts _that_. When she gets bored of that, she eats the biggest meal she's had in months. She’s just starting to contemplate jumping from her balcony when she realizes Mjölnir is close.

At which point she comes to her senses that she's on a S.H.I.E.L.D. base and her secret identity is going to be shot. She quickly throws her helmet in the largest purse she can find and wraps a heavy coat over her armor. She pulls her long hair down to cover as much of her face as she can and walks as quickly as she dares, trying not to drawing too much attention to herself.

A few people look, but their eyes soon slide past her so she assumes she's doing an okay job of blending in. Once she makes it outside, she heads for the darkened part of base where she knows no one will see her when she takes off her coat and puts her helmet back on and _runs_.

\--

Even when Jane was in good health, she was never very fit. She'd never been one to enjoy exercise and in most cases running across campus was a necessity rather than a luxury. But tonight, Jane runs and the sensation of it is intoxicating.

She feels alive in a way she's never felt before. She feels sturdy and solid, the way she used to imagine Thor felt. She feels free and she wants to test the limits of her body.

Is this what she would feel like all the time if she ate the fruit of the Asgard Orchard?

She gathers her weight at the balls of her feet and bounds well clear of the back gate. She is gone before the dust settles. She can feel her cape lick the backs of her heels, urging her faster. Her lungs heave and her heart pumps and she realizes that she's laughing. She hasn't laughed, really _laughed_ in months.

She throws her right hand up when she feels Mjölnir approaching. It flies into her hand effortlessly and Jane has to resist the urge to hug it to her chest, as if it were a long-lost friend.

Instead she begins to twirl it, as she'd seen Thor do before.

“Okay, I guess I build up enough momentum and then release it at the apex, and--” Whatever she'd planned to say is torn from her throat as Mjölnir abruptly launches her up with enough force to leave a concussive wave in her wake. Instead she screams and grips the leather handle with all her might.

“Time to test you out,” she tells it as they fly up, leaving the light of the base behind. She tests how to bank and arc. She tries to work out how fast she's going, and what the appropriate trajectories should be. She can feel Mjölnir's resistance. “It's not magic,” she tells it when she understands its protest.

Admittedly, she hasn't quite worked out the exact mechanism Mjölnir uses to fly. She knows from the way they accelerate and decelerate that it can't _just_ be momentum. She is able to move in any direction, even come to a stop at one point. Still, she thinks they must be traveling around the speed of sound, judging by the sonic boom they created when they launched.

She knows that she's not being propelled, but pulled. Which means that Mjölnir must be capable of some kind of propellant-less flight. And if that’s the case, then her theoretical specific impulse, once she'd left the atmosphere, could be limitless. Given that she has a finite mass (assuming Mjölnir doesn't dispel particles like an ion engine) and a calculable delta-v, it was possible. The prospects are dizzying.

She doesn't think it ejects mass, considering she isn't caked in deadly radiation. Maybe it isn't a matter of propulsion at all, but a form of quantum entanglement that tethers Mjölnir to a fixed point, which can traverse the distance like a zip liner. Magnetic fields might play a role…

Before she realizes it, she's stopped in midair, contemplating the science of the impossible. She never thought about it much when it was Thor doing it. She just sort of accepted that there were aspects of his physiology that she would not be able to reconcile. And she'd always sort of assumed that translated to Mjölnir as well. But now that she is the one wielding the hammer, she has to figure out how to use it. And the only way Jane has ever known how to _do_ something is to understand it.

If she can dynamically calculate the curvature of the atmosphere and verify the correct ascension, she might be able to get to the moon. Mjölnir hums its approval. As if it is bored of theory and egging her to just _try_ it. But she's still not sure of her physical limitations, and breaking through the atmosphere feels like a risky test case.

“Screw it,” she finally concedes and gives in to the instinctual desire to _fly_. As with other practical applications of physics, she will learn by _doing_. She spends hours in the sky, learning how to move with Mjölnir because pretty soon it becomes apparent that she is no longer an individual. So long as she wields the power of Thor, she is a ‘we’. [8]

When she's not sure how to do something, she asks Mjölnir. With words and thoughts, she can feel the answers form like memories in her mind. She learns she can release it and fall even at terminal velocity and it will still reach her before impact, as long as it's within a certain range. They haven't reached the upper bounds of it yet, but she's not quite ready to become a splatter mark on the ground yet either so she let's it be, for now.

She learns that she doesn't need Mjölnir to maintain her altitude. Almost like she's levitating. As long as she doesn't try to enact any force, she can remain in place indefinitely.

But, by far, the most thrilling thing she learns is how to harness lightning. It isn't at all like she supposed it would be. She'd always assumed Thor built up a charge, or attracted it, or carried it with him. And he was able to dispel it at will, like a Tesla coil on steroids. But the first time she raises Mjölnir and commands it to bring her lightning she's amazed to feel the atmosphere around her shift. She can feel the crackle of ozone and the temperature dip just before it snakes down through the clouds, snapping and hissing like a dragon. She learns that she doesn't aim it as much as conjure it.

It feels the closest to magic out of anything she's tried so far. That, coupled with the fact that several billion joules of pure electricity have just coursed through and around her body and she feels nothing, makes her want to do it over and over again. She spends a solid hour alone firing lighting of all kinds and power and direction. She can spiral it and aim it and summon it. She can create an area of low pressure and impact thousands of feet below with a barrage of successive strikes with no ill effects.

It's nearly dawn before she finally gives over to Mjölnir’s steady, persistent nagging to fly higher. Until then, she'd kept herself hidden in a thick cloud cover on all sides. But Mjölnir yearns for open skies and Jane can longer dissuade it.

\--

Something shifts inside Jane as they fly. The clouds part like a fine mist that makes her shiver as the stars come into view. Mjölnir banks hard and Jane holds on tight, but she lets the hammer drag her behind without a mind to where they're going. All she sees or feels or knows is the stars. She can see a creeping light rising from the horizon in the east, so she turns her eyes west and has to hold her breath.

Suddenly she's a little girl again, her father's hand guiding hers as they track the night sky together. Cold cheeked, her breath condenses in the chilly air of the higher altitude.

“Oh,” she murmurs and lets the tears fall. Flying is like nothing else she's ever experienced. Tunneling lightning through her body like a conduit had been terrifying and exhilarating. But _this_? This is the best perk yet of being Thor.

The stars are so close and so bright that she feels like she's walking among them. Like maybe if she just reached out a hand, she would be able to graze her fingertips against the black, velvet curtain of night. And she yearns for it, like it were a tangible thing. The universe seems small in comparison to the swelling in her chest and the ache in her heart. She has known love like this only once in her life. It's the same love of a child for her parents. An innate longing for safety and warmth.

When Jane looks up, Mjölnir humming contentedly in her grip, she _feels_ home.

\--

Jane sheds her armor and hides Mjölnir just in time to head back to the lab. But she's been awake for something like 36 hours, so she keeps some of the Thor strength, just for now, so she doesn't collapse in the lab. She arrives to find Erik and Leo hard at work. And judging from their clothes, they never went home last night.

“What happened?” she asks. Something must have happened to keep them.

“It's amazing, Jane! Come look!” Erik exclaims and guides her to one of his workstations. The looks of shared excitement that pass between him and Leo makes Jane's heartbeat race.

They both stand behind her, one at each shoulder. Which under normal circumstances would have driven her crazy, but now she hardly notices. Her eyes are glued to the monitor and the Top Secret Memo Erik shows her.

It outlines an unexplained phenomena that was recorded by the proto-global early warning detection system. After New York, S.H.I.E.L.D. and pretty much every other country in the world realized the need for better preventative measures against an alien invasion. 67 countries signed a treaty to set up a global alert system for interdimensional travel. The initial accord was set to be complete by 2020, but political and financial issues had already set it back by another decade.

When the convergence happened, the warning system had only been theoretical. But if this memo was anything to go by, they must have ramped up the project since then. Jane was a major consultant for the initial designs, but after London, a consortium of private technologists had approached her about patenting the gravimetric field generators they'd used to contain the galactic syzygy.

She'd gladly stepped aside and directed them to Erik. She had no interest in fame or notoriety. And she certainly didn't want for funding anymore. She sort of forgot about it, actually. But that seemed to be the only thing that made sense. Private corporations must have gotten involved in the treaty, either as lobbyists or consultants. She knew it was the only explanation; there were no other tools Jane was aware of that could have detected the untethered end of her wormhole in empty space above the pacific.

And the readings she sees are exactly what one would expect from someone struggling to interpret the data from Erik's gravimetric field generators.

There is no doubt, to Jane, that's what she is looking at. And judging from the look on Erik's face, not only is he just as surprised to hear about the program's unprecedented progress, but he also seems to come to the same conclusion about its source.

“You sold it?” she asks, looking up at him in shock.

“No. I couldn't. S.H.I.E.L.D. technically owned the intellectual rights since I was still employed by them when I developed them. Even if I was on sick leave,” he tells her. And she knows the shame of it is eating away at him.

“I guess once they got back on their feet, they made the early warning detection a priority.”

“Yes, yes,” Erik says, waving his hands dismissively. “But do you see? You know what this means?”

“It means it worked!” Leo answers for her. When she turns to him, his smile is bigger than she's ever seen.

“I wish they had better sensors,” Jane laments. The memo seems to indicate a small distortion in spacetime, consistent with a wormhole like the bridge Thor used to travel. Both the duration and relative size of the distortion seem to indicate it must be related to their experience. There are still a lot of unanswered questions. But for now, Jane is satisfied to just bask in the unexpected confirmation of her theory of relativity. “It worked,” Jane mutters to herself, just barely resisting running her hands over the screen in something embarrassingly close to a loving caress.

“It worked,” Erik repeats, and for a while no one speaks. Jane can feel the weight of the room settle on her shoulders. The magnitude of the success feels like lead. Because this doesn’t just mean that wormholes are now a real-world, semi-viable transportation method. It also means they've just completely rewritten the underlining principles of modern physics. Jane has just obliterated an entire field of science. String theorists all over the world will have to find other work.

She presses a cold hand to her head and closes her eyes. She can feel Mjölnir pull away from her; the strength she’s been siphoning from it since last night abruptly dries up. “No,” Jane protests weakly a second before everything fades into black.

She’s worried she’ll never wake up again.

\--

Jane is slow to wake; she feels heavy and sluggish, dazed by a mélange of drugs that cloud her system. “Mom?” she calls and tries to extend her hand.

“No, it’s me,” the woman says. “Darcy.”

“Darcy,” she says, testing the feel of it. She associates it with a warmth in her chest that makes her think of hot summer days. “How long?” she asks as soon as her faculties return. She feels the pressure of her countdown ticking away and it is the only question that matters. How long does she have to live? How long was she unconscious for? How long? How long? How long?

Time has become her enemy now; moving without her intent, it ferries her along, getting incrementally closer to her end.

“Erik brought you in. You passed out in the lab this morning,” Darcy answers and she looks so scared, so hesitant that Jane shudders to think what she must look like. “The doc said you stopped your treatments. Why, Jane? Don’t you want to fight this?” There is a betrayal there, an accusation that Jane is giving up, leaving her, that isn’t too far from the truth. But Darcy in possession of that knowledge is upsetting to Jane. The look on Darcy’s face when she says it, young and confused and angry, brings a pain Jane has no words to describe.

“They got in the way of work,” she tells Darcy, but even the exertion of speaking makes her sweat and pant. “I was always going to die, Darce. It’s just a matter of time.”

“I don’t even know who you are anymore. The Jane I knew would never just _give up_.”

Jane watches her go, a sadness settling in the pit of her stomach. It’s not the goodbye she wanted to give Darcy, but she knows that’s what it is. She deserved more, but Jane can feel herself being pulled in too many directions. There isn’t enough time to do everything she needs to. And with the Einstein-Rosen Bridge all but proven, she feels the weight of that task slide from her shoulders. She knows Erik will be able to continue her work from here. He will need to find a way to tether the end, direct the clone particle to accept the end of the wormhole transmission, but she has no doubt he can do it.

That leaves her with only one last thing to consider. Mjölnir. She understands, through the strange trickle in her mind, that intent and proximity are in play. Mjölnir is not just an object she can pick up or set down at will. Either she accepts that she is Thor and embraces it, or she accepts that she is human and will die very soon.

Despite the shame she feels, she knows that she’s not ready to die. Darcy was right about that; she doesn’t give up. She’s going to be Thor for as long as her body can hold out. But before she can do that, she knows Jane Foster has to die.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [7] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/117684419565>  
> [8] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/123768996412>


	5. Chapter 3: Loki's Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki is unaccustomed to waiting, particularly after the years he spent as King, but wait he does. This new Thor seems to have set Mjölnir down where no other mortal might touch it. She will come again to claim it; he has only but to wait.

“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend… I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend…” ― Neil Gaiman

\--

Loki sits upon the golden throne of Odin's, Gungnir in hand, and passes judgement on the realm that kneels before him. He has watched the monumental, shining effigies of the great Allfathers who have come before him glint in the bright, stolen sun of Asgard, and feels nothing. There is no joy at ousting his father, no pride in the ease with which he tricks his brother. There is no cleverness to the ruse.

Instead, he spends endless hours in his mother’s chambers, remembering the woman who raised a monster as her own. He is aimless in this new tyranny; there is no revenge to seek or foes to make tame. He dares not set his mind to the Jötunheimr, lest he fall into old hatred and risk losing the tentative grasp he holds on his rule.

He raids the sacred texts of old, pillaging Odin’s personal libraries of ancient tomes and scrolls. He does not put a name to the faceless fear that drives him, but he knows the ominous voice that pained him from afar when he waged war on Midgard is at the core of it. War is coming to Asgard, of that Loki is sure. He has seen it foretold by prophets in all nine realms.

The Ragnarök comes.

And Loki knows he is destined to die. Always, he watches Heimdall, careful in his subtleties so as not to attract those all-seeing eyes. He spends his days amassing a vast collection of knowledge that he hopes will be enough to defeat the Mad Titan before ruin comes to Asgard.

In the two years since his ‘demise,’ Loki has kept a close eye on his brother and his mortal. He watches, with a mild kind of fascination, as the mortal woman grows weaker and paler day by day. 

He watches the artificial man of metal threaten Midgard and distracts himself by watching his brother play at being a hero once more.  But before his idiot brother can return to Asgard to query Loki (dressed in his father’s garb) as to what his visions foretell, the one-eyed human commander locks Thor in a room with a dusty book that speaks of the death of all. Loki knows the text well; he too has sat in silent vigil while it spewed lies and half-truths meant to dissuade him from his path. It speaks of the coming of the end, of the one who will lead Thanos to Asgard and burn it to ash. It speaks of Thor as the oncoming storm, he who will precipitate the ruin of all that Loki has come to covet.

Then, to his surprise, his brother abandons his hammer and armor, worthy no more of the power of Thor. All because of a human myth. Loki is incensed. He rages in his private chambers, magicks the room to utter shambles in his fury. Just when Asgard will need both its princes, Thor turns his back on them. His own people. He chooses to wallow on Earth rather than send for Heimdall to retrieve him. He believes that his journey home will spell the end of all.

Loki takes to the skies. Cuts a bloody swath of destruction from one realm to the next, declaring Asgard the Rule of All. Lesser worlds cower in his presence, the thundering voice of Odin proclaiming might and victory against all who stand opposed. And in return he watches as all the realms kneel before him, their faces bright with gratitude but also… fear. And oh, how satisfying that is.[9]

Even the Jötunheimr bows to his wishes. He considers retrieving the Tesseract, using its power to subjugate even the foulest of enemies. But he is all too aware of his own shortcomings. The Tesseract has a stronger will than most, and he will not have the fortitude to conquer the heart of it. He will burn out his soul long before he’s able to stop Thanos.

No, his only goal now is to build an army superior to that which he knows lurks in the dark spaces between worlds. Loki still feels their presence in his mind, the chittering and clacking of the Chitauri’s bio-mechanical bodies as they spilled through the rift in space. He shudders at the thought.

He will not bow to Thanos again.

The Other is dead; he has seen it as he traversed the realms as an astral projection. But the infinity stones are not as safe as they once were, hidden in obscurity. Now that the universe knows of their existence, Thanos is moving like a black spector in the shadows, slowly taking each for himself.

Loki holds the space gem, the Tesseract. A far off world with power and forces of their own hold the newly discovered gem of power. The Collector once safeguarded the reality gem, the Æther, which Loki himself had come so close to possessing when it lay buried deep within a mortal woman. But since his storehouse in Knowhere has been decimated, Loki is no longer certain who possesses the Æther.

The last gem Loki knows the location of, and to be safe from Thanos, is the mind gem. That wicked, accursed stone that (for a brief period) usurped his agency and will. For just as he had stolen Erik Selvig’s and Clint Barton’s minds, so too had Thanos stolen his. Made him an unwitting accomplice to murder and treason. Not that he wouldn’t have gladly taken Midgard for himself, if he’d had the inclination. But he took no pride in the twisted malfeasance foist upon him. He regrets now his decision to keep his own council on the power of the mind gem. Perhaps if he had not allowed his vanity and pride to stand in the way, his mother would not have gone to her grave thinking him a traitor. But he was wounded, shamed by his weakness to yield so completely to the will of another, and sought only to lash out in anger at those who professed to love him but still were willing to think the worst of him. Loki takes care not to spy on the wielder of the mind gem now; an artificial man who wears the jewel like a talisman of his might. Even his brother seems to love it so. Loki does not wish to dwell on it.

Thanos already possesses the gem of time. It’s rumored that he found it when he was still a young man and unable to control the power of it; when cast back through time, before the creation of the universe. He aged but was unable to die. And after eons of existence, his mind had warped. He no longer feared death, but rather worshipped it as a woman, Mistress Death. He told Loki once that he sought to destroy all life in the universe, in offering to Mistress Death, in hopes that she would finally come to him and accept his love. His madness had seemed of little note then, when he was just another being, scrambling for power in the shadows. Loki sees, now, the folly of his dissmissal.

The last of the gems; that of the soul, Thanos searched for when Loki was under his control. He does not know what became of Thanos’ campaign for it, but deep in his father’s archives, he finds a reference to a stone of unprecedented power that was mined from the depths of a rogue planet. A strange world that orbited no sun nor belonged to any galaxy, but rather sped through space alone, marooned, untouched by external forces. It was a cold, dead world. This stone was said to have the ability to interact with the soul. The records were vague and seemed to have been purposefully concealed, but the intent seemed to be the creation of some sort of perfect being, only referred to as ‘Him.’ It was in the early years of his father’s reign, when Asgard was still locked in a bitter war with the Jötunheimr and its allies. The experiment seemed to have failed, if the last entry is any indication. It makes reference to an ‘incident’ where the cocoon that housed the being set itself upon its creators, killing all involved. The cocoon was banished, and the gem along with it. Loki suspects that cocoon holds the last of the stones that Thanos seeks, but has yet to find it in his wanderings. He hopes Thanos is as unsuccessful as he.

With the armies of the remaining nine realms in alliance, Loki believes he will lead them to victory. Then he will be able to free his father from the interdimensional holding cell he crafted for him when he returned to Asgard. Once Loki saves the universe, his father will have no choice but to acknowledge his strength and declare him fit to rule. Thor renounced the throne unprompted, but Loki knows the only way he will one day rule as himself and not his father, he must prove that he too is worthy. He may never be able to wield Mjölnir, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t fit to be a king. Loki will be the Allfather. First, he must figure out how to defeat a being older than time who cannot die.

\--

“My King,” Heimdall stands in the great hall, his head bowed in supplication, and Loki represses the urge to smile, lest he be found out.

“Speak,” he commands.

“There is a new Thor, one who has wielded the mighty hammer, Mjölnir, most expertly,” he informs Loki evenly. That slow cadence of his voice is grating.

“Speak true, guardian of the realm. Who is he who has succeeded where even my most noblest of heirs has failed?” Loki doesn’t choke on the words, but he is alight with the bitter resentment accompanied from feigning his father’s favor.

“He is a she, oh King. I know not who, my lord. But she is of Midgard, of that there is no doubt. I did not see her take the hammer, but I felt as soon as she raised it up. Mjölnir has fashioned a mask of her helmet, shielding her identity from even me. Though,” he began. A half-start of trepidation. It was unlike Heimdall to question himself. “I feel as if I know her. The way Mjölnir prefers her is strange; it moves so unlike in millennia past. I will watch her closely, my liege.”

“No,” Loki snaps, standing unexpectedly. All around him, men fall in waves to heave themselves below Loki’s towering frame. He takes a certain delight in watching them bow on bended knee. If only they knew who it was they groveled before. “I will see to her myself. Tell my son to go investigate this new Thor, to see if she is truly worthy.”

“How do you know Thor will come, my lord?” Heimdall asks, and Loki sees a glint of _knowing_ in his gaze that unsettles him.

“I know my son better than most,” he says, sweeping from the hall. His personal guard and Heimdall follow in his wake.

He has been unable to leave Asgard except for short projections of his mind to distant worlds to check on Thanos’ progress, because he was too afraid of being discovered as a fraud. Odin was not able to travel between realms as Loki can. And he could not risk leaving Asgard so unprotected, now that the real Odin was not there to defend it. But the prospect of a new Thor, a female mortal no less, is too much for him to resist. His curious nature gets the best of him. And he knows Thor too well; the first thing his brother will do when finding that Mjölnir has replaced him will be to come home. Thor can safeguard Asgard while Loki interrogates one small human, surely.

“See that I am not disturbed,” Loki instructs. He watches Heimdall’s lips quirk downward in suspicion. But he strikes the platform of the Bifrost gate with the end of his great staff and Heimdall quickly falls into place. The travel is arduous while still in his guise of Odin, but he manages to emerge on the light side of the Midgardian moon, standing beside Mjölnir.

\--

Loki is unaccustomed to waiting, particularly after the years he spent as King, but wait he does. This new Thor seems to have set Mjölnir down where no other mortal might touch it. She will come again to claim it; he has only but to wait. In the meantime he watches the rainbow light of the Bifrost carry his brother aloft, back home to look for answers he’ll not find. Loki already knows why he isn’t worthy, and no book will be able to take back the fear he’s allowed to hollow himself out. There is a darkness growing in him. Were the situation different, Loki would have stoked that darkness, urged it to grow until it managed to consume his brother. A few years ago he would have taken great pleasure in watching his brother fail so spectacularly. Now, he only finds that it aggravates him to know he must do everything himself.

While he waits he spies on Thor’s mortal, the woman who is slowly withering away. A dark malady eats away at her core, a sickness that steals her strength. She has lost all her hair, and the dark circles that mark her unnaturally large brown eyes look unsettling. She pumps poison into her veins in hopes that it will kill the sickness faster than it will kill her. It is a battle she is losing. Each day she is one step closer to death. Loki feels nothing at her impending demise. How can he, when watching her decay is like watching a tiny star implode? She burns bright and hot, running out the time on her clock, slaving away on Midgard sorcery that he doesn't understand. She seeks to distort space, to rip it open through force with energy-laden particles that spin and collide and fuse into a dense ball of matter so heavy it punctures its own well of gravity. A strange end to a simple means.

Humans are such primitive creatures, such strange things. They know they will die in short order, and yet they scramble like insects who feel the coming storm, struggling to tame the impossible to grasp the unknowable in their brief lives. They are ephemeral, too fleeting to affect change. Yet, they cannot seem to stop themselves from trying. Were he not already preparing for a war to end worlds, he would certainly have spent more time studying their strange ways.

That is why he cannot help but come when he hears of a mortal who can wield Mjölnir. When he, a god, is so unable to move it. How can something with no concept of the vastness of time and space dare to hope to contain its power?

He touches the hammer only once while he waits the day it takes for her to appear. It is as it always was; unmovable. Even for all his power and strength. Aggravated and embarrassed at himself for even trying, half convinced that Mjölnir is somehow mocking him by its refusal to move, Loki is almost ready to call to Heimdall and ask to be returned. But before he can make the decision to leave so unsatisfied, he watches in horror as Mjölnir rises from the lunar dust and flings itself headlong towards the spinning planet below.

Loki, unsure of what this means, cloaks his presence from the Earth and Asgard and follows it down. He can see the yellow glow of it skimming along the atmosphere before it dives down, into the pull of the planet’s core.

\--

Loki watches in barely contained awe as the woman flies through the air. Her form is crude and she doesn’t seem to know how to follow the hammer, as if she seeks to fly beside it rather than behind it. Her shoulder pulls from its socket once when she fails to anticipate the movement of it. Which Loki finds to be wholly disturbing. For as long as he can remember, the hammer was the will of Thor. He threw it where he wished to go, held it heavenward when he wished to summon lightning, and smashed it into the crust of distant worlds when he wished to wrought absolute destruction.

Never has he witnessed the hammer imbued with a will of its own, choosing which direction to fly or how it wished to move. But this woman seems content to let herself be dragged through the cloudy night sky like deadweight.

He watches as she _learns_ how to call down lightning. She funnels it into her own body, the hammer a conduit to the electricity in the air, and releases it as a blast of intense heat and energy that leaves her skin shining with it. He grows enraptured watching her. Her muscles are toned and lean, but she possesses a strength equal to that of his brother, he’s sure. How can a human woman possibly contain that kind of power? Surely it would burn her up?

Her face is hidden even in the clouds, but she has blonde hair like Thor’s, and wears a red cape and armor that are uncanny in their likeness to his brother’s. She really is the New Thor.

He watches her for hours; watches the way she learns, how she moves, how she seems to be connected to the hammer in a way that is at once natural and unnerving. It speaks to a connection that even Loki does not fully comprehend. What is it that makes her worthy? What does she have that he so lacks? These are questions that he had come in hopes of finding answers to. But the longer he watches her, the more questions he has.

Just as dawn approaches, he watches a shift in her. Something rigid in her shoulders rattles loose. The set of her jaw goes slack as she rockets up through the cloud cover and out into open air. Her entire demeanor augments. She transitions from a tightly wound ball of muscles and nerves, like Thor before a battle, to a fluidity in her hips that gives the illusion of soft lines and grace that did not exist before. This kind of flying is like art, like dance. He watches her as her breath hitches and she exclaims a quiet ‘oh’ as she looks up and catches sight of the stars caught on the dwindling black of the setting moon’s horizon. She is almost beautiful as she cries.

\--

Loki steals away, back to his solitary vigil of this world's only satellite. He struggles to make sense of it, of her seemingly limitless compatibility with Mjölnir. He’s never seen anything like it. He decides he’s worn his disguise of Odin for too long, and under the careful shroud of imperceptibility, he finally drops his father’s face. After two years of constant projection, he feels a little off kilter as himself, like he’s lost something in the transition.

He takes refuge on the moon and watches Jane Foster die.

\--

“There’s something I have to do,” Jane tells Erik from her hospital bed. She is lightheaded from the painkillers.

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says, slightly annoyed. Like she’s thinking of getting up and walking out and he means to stop her.

“I’m sorry. I’ll come back. But I have to go.” Jane can feel Mjölnir slipping from her grasp. But she can’t let it go. She’ll make sure her body gets back to Earth someday. “Bury me next to my parents,” she says weakly.

Erik is crying and she wants to tell him not to. That she’s going to come back someday. But right now, she needs to be someone else for a while. “Don’t go,” Erik sobs and holds his hand to her cheek.

“I love you,” Jane says, because she knows there’s nothing else.

\--

Mjölnir is unhappy with its previous wielder’s brother lurking so close. It felt his hidden presence last night as Jane learned how to be Thor. But it’s even more disquieted now that he’s dropped his guard and sits with his cold hand on Mjölnir’s handle. Mjölnir still judges him to be unworthy, and he is full of dark schemes and tricks even now. It wishes to shield Jane from this man, but knows if it does not go to her soon, it will lose the bright light of her soul.

She is slipping away from it too quickly. It must somehow convince the trickster god to bring her to it so Mjölnir can grant her the strength to live. It knows she will eventually die from her sickness; there is nothing that it can do to stop it. But it can sustain her for a while longer. Long enough to protect this realm at least.

Mjölnir reaches out to Loki, sends him a disjointed sense of impending doom and urgency. It orders him _bring her to me_.

\--

Loki is jostled out of his foray into the woman's death by a sharp and desperate whine emanating from Mjölnir. The frequency with which it vibrates makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. And he is suddenly overcome with the necessity to touch it. It’s not simply a yearning or desire. It’s a compulsion. Mjölnir demands it.

He struggles to retain control over his limbs, but the call of it, the singing in his veins - it’s a part of him. Obedience is requisite.

But the second his skin comes in contact with the handle, he is ordered to open a portal.

 _Bring her here_ , Mjölnir commands.

Loki tries to block out the screaming of the plea, but it grows louder and more violent each second. He doesn’t have time to consider that he has dropped the disguise of Odin or question its motives. The only thing he can do is make it stop, before it burns him up from the inside.

He focuses his mind on one thought, one task. _Bring her here_. He pulls from the well of magic in his soul, the way his mother taught him to, and channels it into his blood and bones. He can feel the electricity of it snap in his veins and race towards his heart. He instructs it to reach out to the hammer and summon its owner forth. He circles his hands, pooling power in the space between his ribs, and with one final _crack_ of energy, he releases it.

\--

There is a blinding flash of light so bright that Erik has to shield his eyes. It seems to be coming from Jane. But before he can think to move, the light is gone with a deafening _boom_. Jane’s machines flat line, and her body is gone.

“No!” Erik screams, bereft. “Don’t take her!” he screams at the ceiling, as if Thor can hear him. For in his grief it is the only explanation he can think of. That Thor took her to be made into a star in Asgard. It would have been perfect for Jane, except Erik already promised to bury her next to her parents. “Please,” he cries, his tears hot and nose burning, “let me bury her.”

But the sky is quiet. No one is listening. He is all alone.

\--

In the moments just after the enchantment is cast, Loki realizes his mistake. He's allowed Mjölnir to use him to transport the New Thor here, while he’s uncloaked and exposed. Enraged, he slams the bridge shut, but it’s too late. In a burst of light so intense he has to look away, he sees the silhouette of a woman.

Before the light dissipates, Loki flings his Odin mask up and tightens his grip on his staff. He will not give her the satisfaction of seeing his true face, even if she somehow knows.

\--

Mjölnir feels Jane pulled through the incandescent crack in spacetime. It clothes her in her armor and helmet vestments and abolishes all traces of the dying woman and facility where she was left to die.

It has already seen her intentions in her heart; she sees now that she is no longer capable of reverting to her mortal self without suffering for it. Death is all but assured, were she to lay it down again. Mjölnir will stave off this illness for as long as it can, but it already knows a day will come when even it will not be able to keep her body going. But there is time still. Time to fight. Time enough, even with as little of it as Jane has, to stop what is coming.

There is a darkness coming to the universe. And Mjölnir knows Jane Foster will wield it in glorious battle, the likes of which it will never see again.

\--

Jane feels like she’s being stretched and drawn. She is taffy in a pulling machine. She is blazing with pain. She can feel the agony in her DNA; she’s made of it. It stitches with the fabric of the universe and weaves a pattern of torment and suffering she doesn’t know how to process. There is a bright light and momentary disorientation and then she’s standing.

She looks down at her feet, expecting them to be on fire after the pain she felt. But instead she sees her boots standing amidst a thin, grey, powdery dust. Her red cape tickles the backs of her ankles and she struggles to remember how she got here.

In her grip, Mjölnir hums its soft reassuring consent. It brought her here. Jane Foster is dead. She is Thor now.

And before her stands the Allfather, Odin himself. And beyond him, Jane can see a hurricane swirling in the Atlantic as it leaves the coast of Africa. It takes a few seconds before she comprehends what this means.

She is no longer on Earth.

She glances to the side; the wide, vast expanse of empty space sprawls out like an ocean in all other directions. The light of the sun is being reflected from behind the grey, pitted horizon. As far as she sees, there is only craters and boulders.

She’s on the moon.

Instinctively, she drops to her knees and wrenches her helmet off, trying to claw at her face and throat, convinced that she is going to die. It isn’t until she’s already removed it, though, that she realizes she’s not dead.

“What happened?” she asks, confused. Because in a matter of only a few seconds, several impossible things have happened. She seems to have been transported, transformed, put on the moon, able to speak and breathe without oxygen or pressure or atmosphere, and Odin is watching her have a panic attack.

“You?” Odin stammers, and there is a flicker to his form that Jane feels like she can see through. As if it were an illusion, a hologram glitching. And behind it, she sees someone she never thought she’d see again.

“Loki!?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [9]   
>  <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/98936365272>


	6. Chapter 4: Truce

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Truce?” she asks, not sure what exactly she’s looking for a truce from. But she understands that there should be some kind of gesture that acknowledges each of them are hiding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some minor allusions to past events that will not be explained in this fic. For pacing reasons I've chosen to remove the section and make it more of a stand alone fic. It's linked in the footnotes and will be posted along with the update next week. Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for reading. ^_^

“We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.” ― Maria Mitchell[10]

\--

Loki watches in horror as the New Thor yanks her helmet off, heedless of his presence. She seems to be scared of something, the way she grabs her throat. He would have berated her fear as someone deserving of the power of Mjölnir, but he has no words for it the second he sees her face. “You?”

Even with her brown eyes transformed an otherworldly blue and long, blonde hair, he recognizes her. Before him stands Thor's own pet mortal. The woman he just watched die. The woman who managed to contain within her frail flesh and bone the power of the reality gem for almost a week. He saw more powerful men eaten away by a lesser stone. He, himself, had never held the Tesseract or mind gem in his bare hands for fear of burning up.

And now, here she is. Standing on the moon, gasping for breath like she were still a mere mortal. In his shock, his Odin visage flickers. He finds her unnerving eyes locked on him, a haunted, pained expression on her face when she says his name.

“Loki!?”

\--

The second his name is out, Jane regrets it. She chalks it up to almost dying and then getting teleported to the fucking moon. Otherwise, there’s no way she would have been so obvious about it. But after she says it, she knows it's too late. She can feel his eyes on her, and she is suddenly, painfully aware that she is 1) alive, 2) on the moon, and 3) Thor.

“Shit,” she mumbles, trying to shove her helmet/mask back on, but she knows the damage is already done. Just as she’d seen through his disguise, he’s seen through hers.

“A bit late for that,” he says, and it’s the first time that she really takes notice of his voice. She doesn’t so much _hear_ it as _feel_ it. Both of their voices are somehow able to vibrate at such a low frequency, they are actually transmitting the sound as tremors through the surface of the moon. Each time they speak, her feet quake and she can feel the words in her bones. So, okay, that’s weird.

But not quite as weird as the fact that her hair and his seem to be capable of defying microgravity. It should be sticking straight up, floating all around her face. But it’s not. It lies flat on her shoulders, as does his. Just some other things to throw on the pile of impossible things she’s come across in her short life.

“I guess so,” she admits, hefting Mjölnir onto her shoulder, a nice reminder that things aren’t the way they were when they last met. They parted as uneasy allies, and in her own way she mourned him.[11] Not as profoundly as Thor had, but she still remembered the part Loki played in her salvation. Not just in the deception of Malekith, but in the way he’d thrown himself bodily over her when those quantum grenades were being thrown around.[12] “So,” she begins, watching closely as he drops the illusion all-together. “Truce?” she asks, not sure what exactly she’s looking for a truce from. But she understands that there should be some kind of gesture that acknowledges each of them are hiding.

He looks different than he had the last time she saw him, dying in the barren wastes of Svartálfaheimr. He’s not as gaunt as she remembers, and there is more color to his face than there had been in death. His hair is almost the same length as it had been, maybe just a little longer. But he wears it pulled away from his face in a half bun, adorned with bits of gold and green. There are stray strands that have fallen loose, perhaps from his travel. His high-collared green robe is embroidered with golden hems.[13] Oddly, the whole thing seems to make him look much younger than she remembers.

There is an anger that strikes her as petty when she asks. Like he’s offended a human would dare to speak to him. She’d heard all about his godly temper tantrum from Erik in the year after New York was decimated. But then whatever trace of malice she thinks she sees is gone. In its place, Loki wears a perfect mask of indifference, as if her truce is not just some trivial thing, but that it warrants greater scrutiny. His moods seem as mercurial as ever. “You wish to hide your identity from Thor,” he states simply.

“I am Thor now,” Jane corrects him. She doesn’t lash out, but she sees him recoil as if she struck him. “Your brother now goes by ‘the Odinson,’” she informs him.

“How crass,” he comments and leers at her. She wants to put her mask back on, but so long as his illusion is down, she feels like she should reciprocate.

“And yes,” she answers. “I wish to keep this from him. As you wish to keep your lie from him. Not only are you alive, but you’re pretending to be the Allfather.” She watches him carefully for those telltale signs of rage she saw in him before. But she sees nothing but a snake, content in its own skin. “Does Odin live?” she finally asks, putting words to the fear that she’d felt at his first appearance. If he is sitting on the throne, where is the real Odin?

“He does,” he answers smoothly, his silver tongue as adept as ever at manipulating words. “You think me so low as to resort to patricide?”

“I think you’re capable of anything,” she answers truthfully and his smile falters.

“And you, how you must have celebrated when you stole Mjölnir from my dolt of a brother,” he snaps. She recognizes a defensive barb when she hears one. “What a remarkable human he found in you. Able to restore his worth in only three days, only to take it from him just when he needed it most.”

“Mjölnir chose me because Thor lost faith in himself.”

“I thought you were Thor now,” he reminds her coolly and she feels like she’s fallen into a trap.

“Walked right into that one,” she admits. “Fine, he’s Thor. I’m Thor. We’re all Thor. Except you,” she points Mjölnir at his chest in what she hopes is a menacing stance. “You’ll never be Thor.”

“How lamentable,” he quips and Jane kind of feels like slapping him again.

“So, where is Odin?”

“Safe,” he says and gives no indication that he’s going to elaborate. “Ah, condolences on your passing,” he finally says.

Jane grits her teeth and pulls the hammer back. Mjölnir hums in her grip, a stillness that seeks to calm the raging of her anger. “And my condolences on yours. How many times have you tricked your brother into mourning for you? At least twice. And you still haven’t told him about New York?” She makes her voice sweet as sugar and smiles demurely.

“What is it you think you know of my time spent in Midgard, mortal?” he practically spits, his ire making his cheeks ghost a splotchy pink.

“I know you weren’t yourself,” she says calmly and looks away to examine the fine details of Mjölnir’s hammer. Somehow, she knows that if she watches him he will just lie. But if she looks away, that anger he desperately wants to be directed out will turn inward. Without an audience, he has no one to hate but himself. She knew it the first time she spoke to him on Asgard, just after she’d arrived from Earth. The dark matter of the Æther felt like a fire in her veins.

~~

“They said I could find you here,” Jane says as she approaches the electrified honeycomb of Loki’s cell. She finds him on his back, his eyes closed, pretending to sleep. But she knows he’s awake. The same way she knows he does it to intimidate her. “How could you?” she asks, hating the way her voice breaks.

“How could I what, Miss Foster?” he asks an inch away from where she stands. The image of him on his back is gone and he stands, transfixed, his eyes boring holes into her. She flinches and takes a step back.

“You know who I am?” she asks, a little surprised.

She only knows his face from clips she’s seen on TV over the past two years. Images of his cruel smile from grainy, shaky cell phone cameras of him flying around on alien crafts, leading an army through a rift in spacetime. She feels sick just thinking about it.

The Battle of New York, the news called it. $160 billion in damage that was only just now beginning reconstruction. There was a memorial to those that died in the attacks, all 419 names etched into white marble and read aloud on the May 4th anniversary.[14] They called it ‘The Incident’ now, which seemed more manageable. Like maybe if they ignored the alien black market that had cropped up in the interim, it would make the tragedy more palatable.

But when she thinks about it now, all she sees is Thor. His red cape like a blood stain in every news clip and image she sees. A red reminder that it’d been three years since he left her in Puente Antiguo.

“Are you pleased?” he asks, his sneer turning sour with malice.

“Hardly,” she snaps.

“Careful,” he warns and she can see the whites of his teeth when she smiles at her, like a feral thing.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she says but her voice quivers.

“Oh, but you should be,” he says and at the way he smiles and runs his eyes up and down her body, Jane feels herself flush with embarrassment before she manages to look up at him again. She has nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to fear.

“What are you going to do from behind there?” she taunts him. “Stare at me to death?”

“Didn’t anyone teach you not to antagonize gods?” he threatens.

“You’re no god,” she says cruelly, with as much hate as she can muster. “You’re just a jealous, bitter, spoiled little boy who will never be a king.”

“And you are nothing,” he seethes, “you _mean_ nothing. He will forget you soon enough, I have only but to wait. In a thousand years your bones will be dust and no one will remember your piteous name!” There is a manic kind of rage in him that is deeply unsettling.

“And in a thousand years, you will still be a monster!” she screams, her face flushing in anger. She can feel the heat in her cheeks and he smiles sweetly, as if she’d just said he were beautiful.

“Better a monster than a puppet,” he says calmly. Like he is telling her about a book he’s read.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He is quiet for a long time, examining her, like he’s studying her, trying to find a weakness. “How small you are,” he finally says, touching his finger to his lips in contemplation. “All bluster and smoke,” he concludes. “No substance.”

“What bothers you more?” she asks just as sweetly. “That I’m human, or that he doesn’t care?” She knows her words sting when his expression hardens.

“Is that why you betrayed him, even as he fought for your pathetic planet?”

“What!?” She steps back, horrified at his accusation. “I never betrayed him!”

“Oh, but you did,” he whispers and it feels so intimate she has to look away. “Just as he did you.”

“You’re lying,” she says through gritted teeth, making sure not to look away this time.

“Ask him, then. How Lady Sif comforted him these past two years.” And there is such cruelty in his words that Jane feels tears prickle in her eyes. “I have seen it,” he coos. “He forgets you, even now. Perhaps he will think of you in a hundred years and wonder what happened to that mortal he met so long ago? Do you not see, do you know? To him, you are a novelty only. Quant and fleeting, a toy to be played with and tossed aside.”

“No,” she argues back weakly. “You don’t know him--”

“I have been by Thor’s side for thousands of years!” he roars and strains forward, just shy of the forcefield. “How arrogant you are,” he finally says, his voice dipping back to its normal register. “You think a handful of days gives you claim to him? You think because he has lain with you that you are somehow special? Listen well, _child_. You are one among hundreds.”

“He came back for me,” she whispers more to herself than him, like she’s trying to remind herself.

“And why do you think that is?” he asks and Jane knows in that instant that Loki is far more dangerous than she thought. She thought as long as he was behind bars she would be safe. But his barbed tongue spins half-truths and falsehoods that make her question herself. He knows just what to say to hurt her most. Just enough of the truth to make her believe it, but everything he says is peppered with lies. “He came because of what you hold within. He cares nothing for you. And soon, you will see. He will take all that you are and toss you aside as if it were nothing to him, to destroy you so thoroughly. Because to him, you are just a momentary distraction.”

His words sting. They poke at the fear that’s been slowly eating at her for the past two years. The first year was hard, because she didn’t know what happened to him. Was he even alive? But then after New York, she _knew_. After New York, the only question that eats away at her, like a cancer, is ‘why’. Why didn’t he come for her? Was Loki right, was she just a trinket? What if he waited another three years? Six? Ten? What if she was in her late forties when he finally came back? Would he still want her then? Would she? How long did he expect her to wait?

She feels a swell of anger inside her that comes from an unnamed place. Dark and deep in her soul, she feels the power of the Æther shudder to life. It creaks and groans and stretches inside her ribcage, yawning wide and clamoring for vengeance. It sings of it in her veins, demands blood for blood.[15]

She can feel the crackle of power against her skin, like the air around her is electrified. Jane, fearing that she will lose control, turns to run when she feels herself stop short. The Æther claws at her throat, swirls and spirals and reinvents its form inside her veins.

“Be thankful,” she almost growls, “that you are in that cage. It's better than you deserve,” and she feels the power surge inside her, burning like fire. She could obliterate him with just a thought. “You are alive because I allow you to live.”

“Well,” he smiles and steps away from the force field, finally. “That makes us even, then.”

She doesn’t stay to find out what he means. It doesn’t matter. He’s a liar and a miscreant. She spits a bitter, “Monster,” under her breath as she retreats.

~~

That had been the first time she spoke to him. Before Thor’s mother was killed, before Odin held her prisoner, before she had to trust him. And when she sees him again later, he cuts her off and pretends like they’ve never met. She doesn’t know why, but she feels like there must be some self-serving reason for it. Was it for his own benefit? Was it to make her lie to Thor? And why had she gone along with it?

She already knew the answer though. It was fear. She feared what might happen if she told Thor about what happened two years ago.[16] She wasn’t sure how he knew, but there was something in the way he said it that made her sure it wasn’t a bluff. And if what he knew about her was true, did that mean he was right about Thor too? Did he and Sif have something? Did it matter?

So, they carried on. Loki leading them from Asgard, he and Thor bickering the whole way. And what a strange thing that had been, to see the two of them argue like… well, like brothers[17]. She knew they were of course, but she also knew that Loki wasn’t from Asgard. Thor told her about his real lineage just that morning when he’d told her what happened to the nine realms, why he’d been gone for the past two years.

She wanted to be angry about it, feel slighted because he came to Earth but didn’t stop by to say hi. But she realized that was petty and selfish and she did her best to work past it. He told her all about what happened when they first met. Why he’d been sent to Earth in the first place, and why his brother attacked him.

She felt honored that he trusted her so much. But that didn’t mean when Loki was standing there like a smug jerk, moaning about how breakable she was, she didn’t feel like throwing it in his fucking face.

~~

“To what are you referring, Thor?” Loki asks and he can see by the way her face pinches that she’s heard the insult.

“I studied the footage from your attack when Thor and I came back, after the convergence. He just couldn’t understand how you could die protecting him when you tried to kill him. I didn’t understand either. I know there was good in you. I saw it. You protected me, and not because Thor made you promise or it was necessary. You saw me in danger and reacted instinctually.”

Loki huffs and looks away from her strange blue eyes. It plays tricks with his head, to see the familiar shape of her face, the moles on each cheek, but framed in golden locks and topped with bright blue eyes. She looks strange, wrong. “Maybe I did it to get Thor to forgive me so when I faked my death, he would believe it, so I could overthrow the Allfather without his interference.”

“Bullshit,” she says and Loki’s mouth quirks in surprise. She curses far more than he’d anticipated. “You were hurt. I saw you get run through. You didn’t plan that. I bet you barely survived.”

“I fail to see what this has to do with my run-in with your world’s _finest_ ,” he sneers, trying to bait her anger.

“You were under control of the scepter,” she tells him and Loki feels the bottom drop out of his illusion. “Just like Erik and Agent Barton. You exhibited the same hallucinatory episodes, unstimulated bouts of pain and symptoms of fever. You were not acting of your own volition. And just like the others, your faculties finally returned when you suffered an equivalent blow to the head.[18]” Loki is very tempted to open a gateway to Asgard and drop her at Thor’s feet. He doesn’t understand why she’s saying this or why she cares or how she knows but his patience is wearing thin.

“Does my brother know about this infatuation?” Loki asks, a leering kind of smile teasing his lips up at the corners.

“We’re both keeping secrets from him,” she says and there is a darkness to her that strikes Loki as beautiful[19]. He likes the thought of having something over this woman, but now she has something over him too.

“Truce,” he finally concedes to her original inquiry.

“Truce,” she agrees and nods.

\--

Jane finally puts her helmet back on. “Well, it’s been fun, but I should be getting back.”

“Oh, we’re not done yet,” he threatens and Jane tries not to be disappointed.

“What can Thor do for the Allfather?” she asks and imagines the way she refers to his father hurts. He still hasn’t answered what he did with Odin. But by having confirmation that he wasn’t exactly the monster she first thought, she feels relatively safe in believing that he’s still alive somewhere.

“How did you come to wield Thor’s hammer?”

“Mjölnir called to me when I was in trouble,” she answers. “I asked for help, it answered.”

“How is it that it flies so well for you? Few have ever lifted the hammer, let alone fought with it, but it seems to move strangely in your possession.” Jane can hear the accusation in his question, that she somehow tricked Mjölnir into working with her.

She thought about it for a second before answering. “We understand each other.”

“Oh?” he asks, his eyebrow raising in question. “Does it whisper to you? Thor could never hear it, but my father used to speak of Mjölnir’s moods as if it were a living thing. I wonder, are you more worthy than the son of Odin?”

“What are you planning? Why did you fake your death? Why are you disguised as your father?” Jane shoots back and gets upset when Loki just smiles. He likes making her angry; she has to learn to read him better.

“Let us not meet again,” Loki finally says, an air of finality in his words. She knows he’s about to catch a rainbow bridge out of here but she feels like she owes it to Thor to find out more.

“Don’t count on it,” she warns. She has another retort she’s ready to lob in his direction at their next volley, but he seems to have lost interest in her. Jane is about to ask him what happened; she can see the way his blue eyes grow dark and distant, as if he’s listening to something far away.

But just as she is about to open her mouth to speak, there is a streak of light in the sky over Earth, and an object moving at incredible speed slams into the surface. Before Jane can even react, she feels the twinge of something at the base of her skull. Latent senses that are tied to the Æther, as surely as she is now tethered to Mjölnir. Something’s wrong. She feels as if something dark and cold has just reached into the heart of her and ripped away a part of her soul.

The haunting look on Loki’s face makes her think he feels it too.

“What’s happening?” she asks, her voice thin and stretched.

“The artificial man - the one called Vision is dead,” he answers. His voice sounds as hollow as hers. “Asgard is in trouble. I must go.”

He raises his arms and rolls his hands in front of him, as if he were shaping the air into a ball. Then she feels a spark of electricity in the tips of her fingers. In a blaze of light, Loki vanishes, leaving Jane alone.

She stands alone on the surface of the moon for a second, trying to wrap her mind around what’s happening. She will think about this day later, when she has time to properly devote the braincells to _how_ exactly she was able to survive in space, and speak and hear Loki. But for right now, she doesn’t really care how any of it is possible, just that it is.

Because, somehow, she _knows_ that the Æther has been taken from its safe place among the stars. The way Loki knew Vision was dead makes her think the flash of light they saw was someone taking the gem from his scepter. And if he left for Asgard, he must suspect the same fate has befallen the Tesseract.

Someone is collecting the infinity stones.

This is exactly what Thor saw in his vision almost six months ago. And that someone is a far worse enemy than Loki or even Malekith ever was. Not only because he seems to have coordinated a simultaneous attack on the stones, but also because the way Loki looked when he left reminds her of footage she’d spent hours analyzing from his time on Earth. Whoever this person is who is taking the stones, no doubt is the same one who sent him to attack Earth, the one who had been controlling him.

The true master of the Chitauri.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [10]   
>  <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/115952453286>
> 
>  
> 
> [11] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/103460017992>
> 
> [12] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/99861988172>
> 
> [13] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/129853053532>
> 
> [14] <http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvelcinematicuniverse/images/e/ec/Battle-NY-NYB.jpg>
> 
> [15] Reference to “[Blood for Blood](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/100500170007)” by StarTraveller776 (no longer hosted on AO3)
> 
> [16] <http://archiveofourown.org/works/5284166>
> 
> [17] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/132293588013>
> 
> [18] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/129761123977>
> 
> [19] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/129566386527>


	7. Chapter 5: The Ragnarök comes

Jane doesn’t waste another second. She twirls Mjölnir in a tight circle and releases just at the point of maximum forward momentum. Together they leave a new crater on the surface of the moon and fly back toward the Earth.

This time she has nothing _but_ time in which to consider the physics of her re-entry. If she flies straight down at the planet, the chances of her burning up in the atmosphere is almost absolute. She needs to deflect the angle of her decent just enough that she doesn’t ricochet off the atmosphere, or skip over it like a rock on the surface of a pond but sinks gentle into it, like the periscope of a submarine breaking the surface of the water. She tries to visualize it, calculate the correct delta-v required for her to not burn up and die. In her grip Mjölnir vibrates a silent disagreement. It seems to think her vector is too steep.

Seeing as how Jane’s never done this before and Mjölnir seems to know what it's doing, she hands the reins over to it. Without her tugging at them, trying to steer them like a ship in a breeze, she can see the way it alters its course to avoid a satellite and other space debris as they transition from a translunar orbit to a low Earth orbit.

She knows they’re getting close when she starts to see the surface of Mjölnir beginning to glow an orangeish-white. That is most certainly an indication of the Kármán line, about 120 km above the surface, where the atmosphere begins to gain enough concentration to begin offering resistance to falling bodies. They’ve passed the International Space Station’s orbit for sure now; it performs scheduled thruster burns to keep from falling too far into Earth’s atmosphere.

As the hammer continues to glow, Jane sees the heat of friction begin to illuminate her own armor. She can feel it on the skin of her face. But unlike the red-hot fiery death she’d been anticipating, it feels like the heat of a fire if she sat too close. It warms her face and makes a sheen of sweat form on her brow, but she is still alive when she finally makes it deep enough in the atmosphere to slow her descent.

“Vision,” Jane muses and wishes she knew where the Avengers hung out, or had a radio or anything. Instead, she lets Mjölnir guide them to North America. If nothing else, she knows where to find Tony Stark.

“Not quite what I was expecting,” a voice calls from her right and Jane turns her head to see a red Iron Man suit sync up velocities with her.

“Tony?” she calls, not sure she really believes what she’s seeing.

“Have we met?” he asks and she can almost _see_ his face quirk in question.

“Uh, no,” she corrects her accent and feels like an utter idiot. “Though I have heard of your great deeds in service to Midgard from my predecessor.”

“Yeah, big muscle-y guy, carries a hammer--” he says and seems to stop himself. She assumes he’s finally noticed Mjölnir. “That, like, a common accessory on Asgard? Magic hammers must be really ‘in’.”

“There is but one hammer. I have taken up the mantle of Thor from the man who now calls himself the Odinson. This realm is under my protection now.” She really hopes her accent is convincing.

“Okay… _New_ Thor. Where’s _old_ Thor?”

“Returned to Asgard. Tell me, what of Vision?”

“Woah now, how do you know about Vision?” Jane can hear the anger in his voice and she remembers that Vision was born from Tony’s program JARVIS and the scepter stone. He is probably upset and angry and looking for someone to blame. And here comes Jane, someone none of them know. It’s no wonder he doesn’t trust her.

“I know he is dead. A danger threatens this and all realms. Take me to your Avengers; we have work to do,” she instructs him and she hopes it’s convincing enough.

“Right.” He draws up the word like he’s not _really_ sure. “We’ll see about that.”

Then he breaks off his descent and Jane is forced to turn over in midair so she can watch him bank left and circle above her. She knows he’s going to attack, but she can’t really make her mind to accept it.

Tony Stark is going to fire one of his pulse energy canons at her. She studied their design, she’s seen the schematics for his suits. She consulted on his spacesuit model to provide him with some dynamic navigation programs for charting by the stars. He built her an arc reactor. She remembers a conversation they had a week ago where he finally broke his impenetrable mask of sarcasm and admitted that he would be sad to lose a mind like hers. She’d laughed through her tears and accused him of sexual harassment.

 _I’ll tell Thor you’re hitting on me. What would Pepper think?_ she’d asked.

 _She’s sad too,_ he said before letting the issue drop and getting back to power output on the reactor.

“Tony, no!” Jane barely has time to scream before he takes aim and fires.

“Sorry, sister. I’ve got orders.”

“I’m human!” she shouts before she feels the impact hit her hard. It feels like getting punched in the gut. Jane recoils and balls herself up tight, clinging to Mjölnir like a lifeline. She’s never been hit with anything like that before so she’s pretty surprised that she’s still alive. But she can feel Mjölnir sing its disapproval. With her weakened body, if she gets hurt too badly, not even Mjölnir can keep her alive. Her power is borrowed, and she is acutely aware of how precarious her life is.

“What?” Tony is shouting in her ear but she is in freefall now.

“I’m new to this whole superhero thing, okay. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m just trying to help!”

“Crap,” Tony groans a half second before his metal-gloved hand circles around her wrist. He seems to have made a decision that maybe he shouldn’t have. “You better not be evil or I swear to God I’ll kill you myself.”

Then he fires his thrusters and pulls Jane along in his wake. “Where are we going?” she calls over the rushing of wind.

“To assemble!” he answers and Jane takes a deep breath. She has no idea what she’s going to tell the rest of the Avengers, but she knows she has to try. _This_ is why she picked up Mjölnir in the first place. This is why Jane Foster had to die, so that Thor could be free to protect Earth. And while she technically only died an hour ago, she already feels like maybe she’s bitten off more than she can chew.

\--

Jane knew it wouldn’t be easy to convince them she’s on their side, but she hadn’t quite expected it to be this hard either. When Tony brings her in, she is immediately surrounded by fifty armed guards, all pointing very large guns at her.

“I’m here to help,” she insists again and Tony slides his faceplate open, looking thoroughly annoyed.

“Lose something?” he asks. Jane looks down to make sure she’s still holding Mjölnir, and she is. She looks back up and sort of shrugs. “Accent?” Tony asks and Jane rolls her eyes.

“I told you, I’m human. I picked up the hammer when Thor couldn’t and now I’m the New Thor. Ask Agent Hill. S.H.I.E.L.D. already knows about it,” Jane protests. “I helped defend a S.H.I.E.L.D. base.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn’t really like strange new people in possession of magic hammers who lie about who they are.” He keeps his hands clamped firmly around her wrists like handcuffs as he leads her, under armed guard, to an intense looking room with raised panels on the walls.

“I’m not lying. What is this place?” she asks, trying to turn in Tony’s grip. But he keeps her still and backs her into the room.

“Holding cell,” he says and Jane’s heartbeat picks up.

“We don’t have time for this. Something really, really bad is coming. We need to get ready, and I need to get to Asgard!” she shouts at the door as it slides shut.

Tony, on the other side of a small window, holds his hand to the side of his head and mouths ‘I can’t hear you’ before walking away.

Jane grunts and puts Mjölnir down a little harder than is necessary. She tries to think of what Thor would do. But she has a feeling she already knows the answer to that. But she’s trying to get S.H.I.E.L.D. to trust her, not drop her into the ocean or something. Soon they’ll transfer her to one of those glass cages Thor told her about. And every second they waste here, the universe is in more trouble. If only Thor were here…

She knows she needs to get to Asgard. And she doubts Heimdall will open the bifrost in the middle of an attack, so that means she’s going to have to get S.H.I.E.L.D. to give her access to her project so she can make a viable bridge right the fuck now. But there’s only one way she can see that happening, and it breaks her heart to even think it. She knows it’s going to be brutal, but she’s also pretty sure it’s the only way.

\--

“Tony? Director Fury? Agent Hill? Hello? Anyone?” Jane shouts at the ceiling. She knows they’re listening. “I’m ready to talk now.”

It doesn’t take too long, but eventually a door opens and an agent walks in. Jane remembers him from New Mexico. “Agent Coulson? I thought you were dead.”

“It’s Director Coulson now, actually,” he tells her in that easy sort of way she remembered being so infuriated with.

“What happened to Director Fury?”

“You might be out of the loop. I’m alive, he’s dead.” He takes a seat across from her at the metal table and Jane is at least aware enough to know she’s being interrogated.

She was high enough in S.H.I.E.L.D. before to know that Fury was really alive and very much still pulling the strings. As far as he could tell, pretending he was still dead was a matter of paperwork, more than anything. But she doesn’t feel like arguing with him over the point. “We’re moving,” she says. She can feel the ground sway under them. Something big though, not like a plane. “A helicarrier? I thought they were all destroyed.”

“I think we need to have a discussion,” Agent Coulson finally says after he gives her an evaluating once-over.

“Fine,” Jane concedes. Her heart clenches; she knows she has to do this. It’s the only way to get them to believe her, to get what she needs. But she also knows this is going to destroy Erik. She knew the only way to _be_ Thor was to do it full time. Going back and forth was going to kill her even faster. And it seemed like the right thing to do, at the time… to hide her identity. That’s what superheroes did, right? God, she was so bad at this, at it’d hadn’t even been a week.

With steady hands, she reaches up and pulls off her helmet. She knows she can’t turn back into her old self. She would die. But she can at least show them her face and see if she can get them to believe her about who she is.

“Have… we met?” Agent Coulson asks, and Jane knows he’s struggling to place her face.

She pulls her hair up in one hand and smiles. “Think New Mexico,” she says softly.

“Dr. Foster?”

“Double crap!” Jane can hear Tony curse behind the two-way mirror in front of her.

“Hey, Tony. Long time no see.”

“I’d heard you died. Today, if I’m not mistaken,” Agent Coulson reminds her.

“Jane Foster did die today. I don’t have a lot of time left, even as Thor. And what time I have, I need to spend protecting Earth and the universe from whoever is coming.”

“And who is that?” he asks, an edge to his voice that she knows means business.

“I don’t know yet. But whoever he is, we’re in trouble.”

\--

It took much, much longer than she’d hoped. But in the end, she convinced them to let her have access to her lab. She had to explain everything first, of course. About Thor and his vision, Loki and his disguise as well as his connection to the scepter stone. She even had to explain about the Æther and Mjölnir, as best she could.

Tony spends a long time looking at her, like he’s trying to superimpose her old hair and eye color over her new appearance. He finally ends up just shaking his head and saying ‘screw it’ before he gives her a crushing hug.

She doesn’t allow herself to break down. She wants to. She wants to tell Tony about what it felt like to fly and stand on the moon and look up and feel more than just an esoteric connection to the celestial bodies overhead. She wanted to explain that she could feel the entire universe connected through the great world tree, just the way Thor had described it to her all those years ago. But she doesn’t. She just smiles and enlists his help with the bridge device.

Eventually someone finds Erik and drags him in. He looks like shit, red eyes and screaming bloody murder at the poor agent who was assigned to tell the mourning man to come to work. But when he catches sight of her, his knees go weak and Jane has to catch him before he hits the floor.

“Janey?” he asks, reaching his hand out to her face, like he’s not sure he trusts himself.

“It’s Thor now,” she tells him, but presses her cheek to his hand all the same.

“How?” he insists when he finally trusts his voice enough to speak.

“Mjölnir,” Jane answers simply and Erik laughs. It’s a hollow and broken thing that makes Jane’s insides twist in pain.

“It always did like you,” Erik says. “Thor told me once that he caught you talking to it. He said it seemed to like you.” They laugh together, because it really is ridiculous.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I was scared and I didn’t want Thor to know. I didn’t want him to hate me,” she tries to explain and she can see the anger in his eyes. She knows she’s hurt him more than anyone. “I told you I had something I had to do.”

“I watched you die,” he accuses and Jane feels an immense shame at the thought.

“I know. I’m sorry. I thought I had to… I was wrong. I’m so sorry, Erik.” His hands on her arms are warm and steady and she feels her heartache at the thought of making him grieve prematurely. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re a scientist,” he tells her and she hears the sage wisdom he tries to convey. She’s not a superhero, and pretending that she is wouldn’t make it any more true. Worthy or not, Thor or not, she is still Jane Foster. And there is only one way she knows how to deal with what’s coming.

“I need to get to Asgard. I need the bridge,” she explains and watches his focus narrow to a single point. She feels the weight of his expression like a physical thing.

“We’re not ready for full-scale tests,” he protests. “What if you can’t get back? I won’t send you to your death.”

“Erik, please. This is bigger than you or me. Something is seriously wrong. This is Ragnarök. Please, I _have_ to do this.”

\--

The rest of the Avengers, new and old, seem to know some of the details. Thor told them about his visions and the interconnectedness of some of the seemingly unrelated catastrophes of the past few years.

She has a short briefing with Captain America, Agent Romanoff, Falcon, Scarlet Witch, War Machine, Agent Barton, Antman, and Spiderman.

“If anyone knows how to get ahold of Dr. Banner, you might want to do that too. We’re going to need his help and not just with science.”

“He hasn’t been seen in almost six months,” Captain America tells her and Jane nods. “I know Thor… or Odinson told me. But this is the safety of the universe we’re talking about. I think he might have a change of heart.”

“So what’s the plan?” Agent Romanoff asks and Jane feels intensely aware of how inexperienced she is at all this.

“I open a bridge to Asgard, get Loki and Tho-- uh, Odinson, come back here, then go after the bad guy. Loki knows a lot more than he’s saying.”

“I still have trouble believing he was under the influence of the scepter and no one else noticed,” Director Coulson interjects.

“It actually explains a few things that didn’t make sense,” Agent Barton says. “We always knew someone was bankrolling him, giving him an army and the scepter, but the way he seemed to be talking to people that weren’t there, like he was following orders… I don’t know. Something about that just fits.”

“Perhaps your judgement is clouded on this topic,” Scarlet Witch says in her thick accent and Jane wants to shrink away from the looks Agent Romanoff and Barton shoot her.

“Trust me, no one wants to hate this bastard more than I do,” he tells her coolly. “But it doesn’t mean we don’t need his help.”

“So that’s it?” Erik accuses and Jane aches at the venom in his voice. “It was the scepter’s doing? All is forgiven?”

“No, he doesn't get a pass,” Jane clarifies. “But Agent Barton is right. We need him.”

“Why?” Erik asks. “He's just as likely to sell us out.”

“I don't think so.” Jane tries to put into words that panicked expression he’d had on the moon when he felt the mind stone taken. But she doesn’t know how to explain it. She and Thor were the only witnesses to his redeeming qualities during the convergence, and neither one of their voices carry much weight as far as Loki is concerned. Agent Barton’s acceptance of his role in the coming war is a good sign, but Jane knows it’s not enough. Not by far. Not when they still read the names of the dead each year in New York.

“I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough.” Captain America shakes his head.

“Look, we need help. And I don't see anyone else lining up. I think we can all agree having Thor would be a big help,” Jane tries to reason with them.

“Aren't you Thor?” Captain America asks and there is a note of disapproval in his voice that she tries to ignore.

“Ugh, fine. Odinson, whatever! And two super-strong aliens are better than one, right?” She’s almost desperate now. Every second they waste here debating this, the worse things are liable to get.

“Except when one is batshit crazy,” Darcy adds and Jane wants to punch her fist through a wall.

“Thor can control him,” she insists. But she already knows that’s not true.

“Yeah, ‘cause that worked out so well the last time,” Tony grumbles.

“Last time was different!” she snaps. “You're all acting like you don't think I know what he did. Trust me. I know. I've seen the fallout of what Loki has done for the past five years. But I also know that there are worse things out there than him! And right now, we need information and allies.” She understands their hesitance to let Loki off the hook. But there is more at stake than just Earth now. “And like it or not, he’s our best chance at stopping this.”

“We just think, maybe…” Captain America starts but has to look away.

“You might be a little too close to this one,” Tony says softly.

“Like you were too close to Ultron? Like that?” she fires back. Tony winces and the anger drains from her so quickly at the sight of it, she feels sick. “I'm not asking for a pardon. I'm just asking for a little leeway. Just for now. He has a lot to answer for, and not just on Earth. But you were willing to put him in Thor’s custody once. All I’m asking for is _not_ to kill him if I can get him to come back. And I’m sorry, but given everything else that’s happened, and the sheer number of ex-bad guys sitting at this table or waiting in the wings, I don’t think it’s too much to ask!”

Tony and Captain America give each other a meaningful glance but eventually they appear to come to a consensus.

“Some leeway,” Captain America finally says and Jane feels the weight of it. There is a warning to his words she never wants to hear more of. “But he's got a lot to answer for.”

Scarlet Witch rolls her eyes, clearly unhappy with the outcome. “There is more hidden at this table than the whole of the universe,” she says cryptically.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Agent Barton snaps at her.

“Tahiti,” she says quietly and at least half the room falls into a terrible silence that Jane has no idea _what_ to do with.

“What did you say?” Director Coulson asks her, holding his hand up to halt whatever anyone else might have said.

“You do more damage to yourselves than your enemies ever could. He is like you,” she says to Director Coulson, but gesturing towards Agent Barton. “She knows this,” she says, waving at Agent Romanoff.[20]

Jane is trying really, really hard to keep up. Something the Scarlet Witch seems to know is seriously upsetting a lot of people in the room. But Agent Barton just looks confused.

“Nat?” Agent Barton asks Agent Romanoff and Jane almost forgets what her first name even is. She’s hardly been on first-name terms with anyone but the scientists and engineers in the room.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Agent Romanoff - Nat - informs him. But Jane can’t help but feel like she’s lying. It’s impossible to tell with all these assassins though. How had Thor managed to keep up with all the secrets and lies?

“We don’t have time for this,” Jane mutters before she brings Mjölnir down hard on the nearest table, causing it to crumple like paper around the force of her blow. She looks a little sheepish at her outburst, but at least everyone else in the room is finally looking at her now. “While I’m gone, we need to get as many troops and weapons ready to go through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge Device as possible. I’m going to need Erik, Leo, and Tony to help me finish the prototype so I can leave today. As far as I know this guy already got at least three of these outrageously powerful things, maybe more. We have to stop him, now. Before things can get any worse.”

There is a rippling nod that sweeps through the room.

“Understood,” Captain America agrees. “We’ll see who else we can find to back us.”

“Don’t skimp on the rehabilitated Russian assassins either!” Tony says over his shoulder before he follows Jane out.

“What was that about?” Jane asks Leo, who just shrugs.

“The Winter Soldier,” Erik says and Jane decides she doesn't have a lot of time to bother with things like superhero politics.

“A difference of opinion,” Tony answers. “Not now, but once we get this all sorted out, the Cap and I have some things we’re going to discuss.” And Jane really, _really_ doesn’t want to be around when that happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [20] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/124364026343>


	8. Chapter 6: Traverse the Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane travels to Asgard

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.” ― Stephen Hawking[21]

\--

Loki feels the exact moment the pure yellow light of the mind stone is corrupted. There is a darkness that takes root in him, a nameless power that makes him feel nothing but dread. Were he not so connected to the insipid thing, it might have escaped his notice. But he also sees the way the woman seems to lose all the color in her complexion at the same time. She tells him the gem of reality has also been taken. Which can only mean one thing.

Thanos is coming to collect.

Asgard isn’t safe with the Tesseract anymore.

Loki arrives to find chaos. There are Chitauri in the streets. Fighting has broken out in every direction he looks. Buildings crumble and burn, and he can hear the screams of his people dying. The sacred orchard is burning, and the towering spires of the capitol have toppled.

Loki drops his charm of Odin and makes for the weapons vault. But there is a great force amassed at the temple doors. He is going to have to fight his way in. He pulls on his reserves of magic and conjures his father’s face once more.

“To me!” he commands what is left of his forces. His men immediately flock to him as he cuts a bloody swath through the Chitauri lines. It is a messy battle; all around him his men fall. The steps to the great hall are coated in a thick layer of blood. Asgard red mixes with the black Chitauri sludge that blots out the golden splendor of the stairs.

“Father!” Thor shouts over the screams of the dying.

“To the weapons vault. They have come for the Tesseract. Stop them at all cost!” Loki orders.

His men surge to obey their king and Thor seems to be happy to have some direction to direct his rage. He barrels through the Chitauri like they are not even there. He has no hammer, but even without Mjölnir, Thor has never been defenseless. He is a god still, and takes up a bloodied sword and spear, felling Chitauri with each passing blow. Further behind him, Loki can make out a clear radius of bodiless space that is flanked by the Warriors Three and the Lady Sif. They fight by their prince, their aim true and their anger just.

Loki is strengthened knowing that they fight for him. But he cannot allow himself to falter now. They must secure the Tesseract, or else all will be lost.

\--

Jane falls to her knees in the streets of Asgard. It’s been more than a week since Vision was killed and Loki left her on the moon.

It takes nearly five hours to convince the Avengers that she needs their help and another eight getting the Einstein-Rosen Bridge prepped for human-sized travel.

The arc reactor is moved off-site and allowed to cycle through a few maximum output tests. With the proper power requirements, it’s just a matter of gathering enough raw materials. In Jane’s case, that means Vironmanium. When Tony hears what she’s been calling his element and its alloy, he laughs for a solid minute. But once he manages to pull himself together, they work to figure out how to direct and ground the clone-particle that’s supposed to allow the wormhole to open at a specific location.

She spends hours going over the data they collected the day before (has it really been just a day? It feels like so much longer), trying to understand why the wormhole opened somewhere else entirely than in her lab.

“It’s a fixed point!” she finally exclaims, startling everyone.

Tony jumps and Erik raises his head, staring at her with bleary eyes. He hasn’t slept in almost 48 hours. “What?” Erik asks.

“I gotta say, it’s really hard to take you seriously as a scientists when you’re wearing that getup,” Tony jokes but Jane is too excited to care. She’s solved it, she’s sure of it.

“The experiment worked. We tethered the exit of the bridge exactly where we wanted it. But the few seconds that it took for the connection to be formed was enough time for _our_ position to move,” she explains. There was something about the distortion’s altitude that was bothering her. Finally, she just broke down and ran a simulation to test the shift of the Earth in the few seconds it took between the formation of the wormhole on her end and the exit forming. The track was perfect. She could trace a perfect arc from her location to its based on the acceleration and direction of the movement of the Earth in space.

“You’re sure?” Leo asks, but she can already see the realization dawning in his expression.

“Quantum entanglement to link the particles works perfectly. The only problem is when one side of the wormhole forms, the enormous gravity well that punctures spacetime locks the other end in place. At the exact moment of the breech the tail of the wormhole become unmovable. Since we are manipulating spacetime, conventional physics don’t apply. Space is forced to move _around_ it. Like putting your hand in a fast-moving stream,” she says for Dacy’s benefit who she can tell she’s losing. “It displaces matter, creating a void, a dip in the water. The same thing is happening to the end of the wormhole. It can’t move _with_ spacetime until a stable connection has been established. And in those few seconds after the hole is created and before it connects, space and planets and the universe itself keeps moving around it.”

For a few seconds, everyone is very quiet. She can see the exact moment each of them know she’s right.

“The particle didn’t move, we did.” Erik says. “The planet kept rotating, and our galaxy kept moving through space.”

“Yes, it accounts for everything,” Jane says, showing them her computer model.

“So what does this mean for you, if you want to get to Asgard?” Leo asks and Jane has to think about it for a second.

“Depending on how long it takes the wormhole to stabilize, the exit will drift away from Asgard. We can try to account for galactic drift, but I have no idea how fast Asgard rotates. I know its relative position, and we can extrapolate based on our latest star charts. But it’s going to be a best guess,” she finally says, shrugging. “It might mean I have to do a little light space flight.”

“You could end up light years from Asgard,” Erik protests.

“Shouldn’t be a problem,” she tells them and for the first time since she picked up the hammer, she feels like she is Thor. Space travel, no big deal. Universe ending bad guys, she can handle that. Flying - sure, why not? There is something terrifying and exhilarating about knowing she is more than what she was before. She can feel Mjölnir hum from where it sits across the room, like it's proud of her.

“Mjölnir isn’t a spaceship, Jane. You can’t just rocket around deep space.” Erik looks like he’s about to explain to her exactly why she’s just said the most idiotic thing he’s ever heard.

“We have no other choice.” Jane tries to make Erik understand that this is who she is now, this is what she does. Maybe it always was. She’s always been too rash, easy to anger and run headlong into situations she wasn’t fully prepared for. It's the reason she met Thor, the reason she became a scientist, the reason she was now revolutionizing modern physics. Even without Mjölnir, she was the kind of person who jumped before she looked. But now that she has Mjölnir, she finally has the power to _do something about it_.

“Jane,” Erik says her name and it breaks her heart. She can hear the grief in his voice as clearly as she can read it in his eyes.

She turns away from him and instructs the rest of the team to start on the drift calculations and get the device set up. Tony acts like he wants to say something, the way he keeps glancing up at her while he works. She thinks maybe he’s considering volunteering to come with her. She knows he has a suit capable of deep space flight, after all. But Jane asks him to make sure that nothing gets destroyed on their end when she’s gone because they’re going to need the bridge when she gets back.

After that, it’s just a matter of time before Jane is standing in an empty chamber listening to the whirling sounds of the arc reactor spooling up. Mjölnir hums in her grip; its calm, reassuring energy is exactly the counterbalance she needs. She is acutely aware that she’s about to become her own guinea pig. This is how scientists blow themselves up, or irradiate themselves into giant killing monsters. But considering that she is already dying and kind of impervious to damage, she figures she has at least a 50/50 shot of surviving this. Which, anyway she looks at it, is a dramatic increase in the probable rate of survival for the planet.

“Ready?” Leo’s voice crackles over the intercom of the closed room.

Jane gives the thumbs up. Her skin feels tight. Her muscles are tense. She’s ready.

“Promise you’ll come back,” Erik says over the radio after a few seconds of scuffling sounds. She has a feeling he yanked the intercom away from Leo.

Jane turns her head to the nearest camera and gives him the ‘okay’ sign. Then crosses her heart.

“Activating,” Leo finally says. Jane holds Mjölnir tighter, praying that this works. It has to work. There is no alternative. “Critical mass at 30%,” Leo tells her. “50%. 88%. Get ready,” he instructs. At the last second, Jane decides to rev up Mjölnir into a spiral so she’ll be ready to fly through the wormhole as soon as it opens. “95%,” Leo shouts. But she doesn’t hear him announce 100%. Instead, she _feels_ the space around her bow and she almost drops to her knees under the weight of her own body. Caught in the gravity well of the Vironmanium, her entire body weighs more than 800 times what it did just a second ago. Space warps before her eyes and where there was just an empty room a second ago, there is now a black hole the size of her palm less than six feet away. The light around the distortion refracts and bends so it looks like a funhouse mirror all around the blackness. There is an earsplitting sound, a high pitched whine that reminds her of sucking air through a straw.

Finally, she releases Mjölnir at the peak of its potential energy and _flies_.

\--

There is no tunnel, no sensation of being stretched or pulled. It’s nothing like flying or falling. Instead it’s like blinking. One second Jane is in an empty lab. Then she blinks, and she is in space. The sensation is wholly disorienting. She allows the momentum of Mjölnir to carry her forward, wherever that might be. She has no landmarks, no way of orienting herself in space. She already knows she’s in no danger from suffocating or freezing or sublimating. She’s probably being exposed to insane amounts of radiation this far out in deep space, but considering she’s already dying of radiation-induced leukemia[22] she kind of doesn’t care.

With her wrist hooked through Mjölnir’s strap, she reaches up her left hand and activates the heads-up display Tony had outfitted for her. Her touch activates the small wristband. Since LCDs don’t work in space (the liquid would either freeze or boil away), which Tony would have anticipated, the wristband seems to be a tiny projector. It’s capable of displaying a thin, flat sheet of tiny green dots in an approximation of a screen. It curves along the contour of her wrist. She’s guessing there must be a tiny RTG powering it and providing heat so the LEDs (the ‘L’ in that one is for light) can work properly. Most electronics don’t like to work in subfreezing vacuums.

After a second to boot up, she recognizes the same navigation program she’d written for his suit starting up. Though this one looks likes it’s been specially adapted for her. There is already a crude 2D display of Asgard orbiting its sun. She learned enough about their basic orbit when she was there before the convergence. She waits a few seconds while the program scans the stars around she and Mjölnir, trying to get their bearings. After another minute, a new graphic is displayed with the green light screen. In it, she can see two orbits come into alignment. She assumes hers is the ballistic approach. It looks like she will have to swing around in order to fall into orbit with the city.

The graphic of their orbital dynamics shrinks to the bottom left corner of the screen and another image is created. She can now see a projection of the course she needs to take. Looks like she needs to adjust her acceleration and trajectory. Right now, she’s headed in an almost perpendicular path. Her current course is in a solid green line, and the corrections are in a flashing green line.

She tries as best she can to convey the change required to Mjölnir. It doesn’t understand the visual display, but moves her in the direction she wants to go. Once her course falls in line with the one set by the navigation program, the lines merge and pulse a few times before it settles into a bright, solid line. The navigation is capable of running simulations based on her current acceleration, because the countdown to arrival in the upper right of the screen is constantly fluctuating. Its first attempt at calculating a time is 897 days.

But once she gets them angled the right way, she directs all her energy to urge Mjölnir faster. It hums in her grip, a steady reply of ‘yes.’ She watches as the time revises over and over until it's hovering somewhere around a week.

Her heart clenches. A week? A week of constant acceleration? How fast will she be moving? How fast is she moving now? The crude display doesn’t have room for things like that and she’s not really sure how to work it out but she knows the answer, fundamentally, is ‘not fast enough.’ She’d assumed that her specific impulse was limitless, that Mjölnir would be able to continue to accelerate indefinitely. Without the drag of an atmosphere there would be nothing to slow her down. So if she just keeps speeding up, depending on how much thrust (or was it pull?) she was able to get from Mjölnir she was sure she could cut the distance down to only a few hours.

Now it looks like she’s severely overestimated Mjölnir’s potential acceleration. It was always going to be a risky move, to launch herself into unknown space and hope for the best. And while this is not preferable, at least she is not lost or still on Earth. She still feels like this is her best chance to stop whoever is gathering up these alien artifacts.

She reaches up with her left hand and interrupts the beams of light in the lower left corner of the screen, where the long range image of her and Asgard orbits are minimized to. Immediately it expands, and her course track screen minimizes itself. She can now see hers and Asgard’s relative positions. She turns her head to the left, scanning for any sign of the floating city.

Almost as far as she can turn her head, while wearing her helmet, she can just make out a smudge of light about the size of her thumb pad when held at arm’s length. And suddenly the enormity of the feat comes into focus. She understands now the magnitude of being able to reach it at all. A week is a blessing, based on how far it must be.

There is still no data on actual distance, but she’s satisfied to let it play out as it was intended. She pokes the small course track screen and it maximizes. There is nothing to do now but wait. As long as she follows the course, she will be there in just under a week. She’s not sure if Asgardians require food and water and rest like humans. But she’d seen Thor do that and more in the two years they lived together after coming back to Earth. Though she was never sure if that was because he needed to or he wanted to.

But even for a human, a week wasn’t impossible. She’s more concerned about sleep than anything at this point, since she’s been up for almost 48 hours already. She knows she’s going to have to sleep eventually. She can already feel the way her thoughts slide through her mind, like sand through a sieve. She won’t be able to steer Mjölnir so she will have to take short naps to keep from falling too far off course. If she makes constant course corrections at shorter intervals, hopefully it won’t cost her too much time.

\--

With nothing else to occupy her mind, Jane is left with her thoughts. She takes short naps, or what she thinks are short. Since she has no time keeper, she really has no way of knowing how long it's been. She can only see her slow progress on the projected screen. She doesn’t have to worry about power though, since it’s powered by tiny lead-encased radioactive pellets. It will probably last longer than she does. Her first nap is the longest, she thinks. Because when she wakes up that is the correction that’s taken the most time. And she was so exhausted by the time she passed out she estimated it’d been nearly three days since she slept. That correction costs her several hours, at least.

The others after that are much shorter. Within a few minutes she’s matched her course to the screen and is free to once again let her mind wander.

She thinks about her parents, her childhood. Growing up in a world where she used to look up at the sky and wonder if they were alone. She thinks about those stars now, the way they’d looked to her through the fogged up lens of her father’s telescope. The way they had to chase Mars as it tracked too quickly out of view to be seen very clearly. She thinks about her first night in a real observatory. It was a joint high school and college program where aspiring astronomers were allowed to use real world equipment with supervision. She remembered being pretty disappointed by most of the other kids who attended. They all seemed to be more interested in each other than the stars. But that wasn’t such a bad thing, in the end. She got to spend a lot more time talking to her instructor and using the telescope than most of the other kids. The post grad who was supervising actually wrote one of her letters of recommendation to Culver.

She thinks about Thor, about Mjölnir, about Odin and Frigga and Loki. She imagines Thor sending her into the stars when she dies, like his mother. She practices what she’s going to say to Thor when he realizes who she is. Will she tell him right away or will she wait until they get back to Earth? Will Loki cooperate? Are they still alive? What if she’s stranded when she gets there? What if she’s killed before she can even make it back to Earth?

She talks to Mjölnir. Not out loud, but she thinks to it. Asks it questions. What was Thor like when he was little? Where was it made? How old is it? Why did it pick her? Was she always worthy? But it doesn’t respond, not like it did before where she could remember the answer. She gets the impression that flying and steering with this level of precision takes effort. And Jane is embarrassed to realize that it might need to rest too. She hadn’t thought about that.

She dreams of home, of the sun and grass and rain. She misses the sound of the wind, the feeling of water on her skin. She misses people. Conversation and physical touch.

She’s scared. She worries that she’s already too late. What if the Earth is destroyed before she can get back?

She tries to distract herself from things like that by thinking about science. She charts the new stars, commits their new shapes to memory. She gives them names and plays connect the dots in her head. She tracks Asgard’s progress through the sky. It’s moving towards its sun and from the longrange screen she estimates that it will be approaching its perihelion[23] when she gets there. She’s not sure how eccentric its orbit is so that could mean winter or summer. Not that it makes a lot of difference on Asgard, she is sure. She knows from stories Thor told her that they had a fairly temperate climate all year.

She tries to calculate how long an Asgardian year or day is in Earth time. She remembers the sun never really sets, but dips below the horizon in an approximation of night. But you could always see some rays of the sun shining up from below the city, casting long moving shadows of the sea walls on the ocean surrounding the city.

This is the way Jane passes the time. She tries to prepare herself, tries to consider each outcome of her sojourn into the stars. But nothing can prepare her for what she finds when she nearly crashlands.

She’s been awake for 19 hours straight, unable to nap anymore, once the shapes of the city begin to come into focus.

The first thing she recognizes is a spire. It glints in the sunlight and the first time she can see it clearly, she feels like she wants to crawl out of her own skin; she is so desperate for something tangible. But the closer she gets, the worse things look.

She’s not sure when she sees the fires, but she sees the smoke first. The way it hazes the atmosphere and billows like dark clouds heavy with rain. She barely has the strength to hang on when Mjölnir takes them into the thick air of the atmosphere. Almost as soon as they are through she feels all the strength drain from her body. She somehow understands that this is Mjölnir trying to slow their descent. But it’s not quite enough and they are both drained.

Mjölnir hits first, creating a crater that Jane drops into.

\--

She isn’t sure how long she sleeps in that crater, but when she wakes up her muscles are sore and stiff. She struggles to stand, and she feels like there is lead in her veins. She wonders what the journey cost her, months or years of her already abbreviated life. She hopes it was worth it.

The first thing she realizes is that there’s no one in the streets. The last time she’d been here, she’d seen people everywhere. She’s landed near the seashore, on the outskirts of town. She feels like she should head for the capitol; that’s her best bet for finding Thor and Loki.

The first body she runs across is a Chitauri. She recognizes it from the footage of New York. They are strange creatures; half reptilian, half mechanical. Its neck is twisted and limbs splayed out at strange angles. She thinks maybe it fell.

She sees more bodies as she walks, since she and Mjölnir are too exhausted to fly. There are more Chitauri, but eventually she starts to see people too. Guards at first; she recognizes their uniforms. Soon enough, she has to weave through the streets, trying to step over and around the bodies of the dead. Men, women, and children lay like cut grain behind the reaper, with no one to gather them. By the time she reaches the steps of the capitol, the streets are stained with blood. It cakes the bottom of her shoes, and the thick smoke chokes her lungs.

She stops breathing, a skill she learned this past week as she flew through space. She’d been so eager to get here she thought she would be happy to stand on solid ground, but nothing could have prepared her for this. There are more bodies that she can count. They lay on top of each other, piles of the dead rising like sand dunes following the ebb and flow of the battle that must have raged here.

She doesn’t remember the way to the great hall, or why she feels like that’s where she should go. But she knows she has to keep moving, never letting her eyes linger too long on the dead. She’s too scared that she might recognize someone.

Something prickles at the back of her mind. Mjölnir is uneasy in her grip. It senses something she can’t yet. The farther into the building she ventures, the more sure she becomes that she can hear someone.  Once the thought occurs to her that the eerie sound is a person, she stops moving to listen closer.

There are no words, just a keening wail that seems to go on forever. It makes the hairs on her arms stand on end. It sounds like a dying animal, howling in pain. Jane can feel her heartbeat spike with panic. She doesn’t want to take another step towards the sound. She wants to run away, pretend she never heard it. It's such a terrible sound because she knows it’s a person. But the way it whines and groans doesn’t sound real.

She imagines some horrible creature lumbering in the dark cavernous heart of the capitol, lamenting and screaming for mercy from its pain. The sound of it rattles her bones, makes her teeth gnash and her heart flutter.

She wants to run, because deep down she might already know what it is, and she doesn’t want to face it. But Mjölnir steadies her heart, funnels as much quietude into her as it is capable.

Slowly, she creeps through empty, bloody, body-laden corridors. The farther she goes, the louder the caterwauling becomes until it grows to be so loud she's unable to hear her own footsteps on the marble anymore.

Then the hall opens, the path widens and the ceilings swoop upwards to such a great height, Jane has to tip her head as far back as it will go just to see the end of the great pillars that spring from the gilded floor. She knows this room. She’s been in it once before. When Thor and Loki took her from the city, this had been where Malekith’s ship had been.

She is standing in the throne room. And at the other end of the hall she can just barely make out the shapes of two bodies. There is no doubt now; the screaming she’d been following for fifteen minutes through the labyrinthine passageways of the capitol was Loki and Thor being tortured.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [21] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/115584580356>
> 
> [22] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation-induced_cancer#Epidemiology>
> 
> [23] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/117774341592>


	9. Chapter 7: Memories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanos takes Asgard

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time for the Christmas update. To everyone in the Lokane fandom, I love you! Merry Christmas. I'll get back to weekly updates once I'm back from my vacation in the New Year.

“Never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention.” ― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn[24]

\--

They are too late to the weapons cache. Loki and Thor arrive to find it already empty. The Destroyer lays as a mangled pile of metal at the entrance. The Tesseract, along with all of Odin’s other treasures have already been pilfered.

“No!” Loki roars, attacking the Chitauri forces that nip at his heels.

“The Tesseract?” Thor asks, but Loki shakes his head.

“Gone. Along with the Casket of Winters and the rest.”

“How could this happen?” Thor demands, bashing a Chitauri’s skull in with one blow.

“Thanos,” Loki answers. He feels a shiver of pure terror ripple up his spine. “All is lost.”

\--

There are five Chitauri guards standing watch over Thor and Loki. She can’t imagine how they can stand so close to their screaming and not be affected. The pitch of their screaming touches a part of Jane she’s never experienced before. There is an itch under her skin, a rage that fills her with power and urges her forward. The impulse to end their suffering is all-consuming.

She must scream when she leaps into the hall. She raises Mjölnir into the air and calls down lightning. Through the roof of the throneroom an electric crack shatters the dome above her, raining down debris and electricity. She feels it course through her body as she redirects it at the guards nearest her. They scream as they die, burning from the inside. Jane feels nothing but a morbid kind of satisfaction at their pain. She kills another two with a single swing of her hammer, knocking them into a pillar that shatters from the force of their bodies colliding with it.

The last guard makes no move towards her and Jane isn’t sure why. Is he communicating with someone? Calling for backup? Maybe he’s triggered a failsafe to blow himself and his prisoners up. She’s not sure, but whatever the reason, it isn’t good. Before she’s even taken another step, she throws Mjölnir. They’ve never practiced that before, but somehow their minds are in perfect tandem. Mjölnir knows exactly where she wants to hit; she tells it to curve in flight so that when it strikes the creature, its body flies to the side instead of directly at Thor and Loki.

Jane holds her hand up to accept Mjölnir back as it circles the room to rejoin her.

Now, with the guards dead, she looks closer at what’s happening to Thor and Loki to make them sound _like that_.

They are kneeling with their backs to her. Their wrists are bound in chains that are connected to poles that have been driven deep into the floor. They kneel at the foot of the throne, as if they were forced to pay fealty to someone who sat in the dais.

And their screams go on and on and on, as if there is no end to their pain.

\--

There is no pause to their screaming, no lull or breath taken. There is just a wall of suffering that makes panic claw at her throat, urging her forward, compelling her to move.

She skids to her knees at the first pile. They have both been stripped naked and she can see their flesh ripple with tremors. With shaking hands, she reaches for Thor, only distinguishable from his brother by his matted blonde hair. But the second her fingers touch his flesh the world around her is blotted out by a searing, scorching, unending pain.

It is like nothing she’s ever experienced before. She can’t think, can’t move, can’t breathe. She can’t even hear herself scream. There is nothing but pain. She is made of it. It’s all she knows. Time loses all meaning in the bright presence of such overwhelming anguish. She has never known torment like this in her life. She is desperate to escape it, struggles to fight against it, to pull away. Anything to make it stop, anything. She’s desperate. She tries to push it away or swim through it but nothing helps. Nothing stops it.

There is no end to this torture. She will die here, doomed to scream and writhe and suffer for all eternity.

\--

Jane wakes in darkness to the sounds of screaming. She is on her feet in an instant; her hand flexes and Mjölnir joins her. But there is no attack, and she struggles to remember what happened. But the wailing cries are distracting her. They strike a chord deep in her chest that makes her clench her fists and grind her teeth.

Then, all at once, she remembers. She remembers finding them, killing the Chitauri, trying to free Thor. Then there was nothing but pain. All she did was touch his bare flesh and she was overcome with so much pain that she must have blacked out. It was only barely high noon when she found them, and now it’s well into night. How long did she sleep while they screamed in agony?

Jane feels sick at the thought. She needs to free them immediately. She already knows she can’t touch them; she’ll be no good to anyone if she dry heaves and passes out again. She crouches down behind Thor and examines his chains as best she can in the dark. She activates the screen on her navigation wristband. It displays nonsense now that she’s on Asgard, but she doesn’t care. She just wants the light.

The eerie green glow of the LEDs bathe the three of them in enough light so she can see how they are tied to the stakes in the floor. They are metal poles with an eyelet which their chains are looped through. There is a single lock holding each of them in place. She’s almost sure she can smash them with Mjölnir. With a torture like this, they wouldn’t need impenetrable locks. She doesn't even think they know she's here, if what they're experiencing was anything like what she felt.

She'd been literally dying of cancer and in the most pain in her life, but what she felt when she touched Thor made _that_ seem like a stubbed toe. She's never experienced anything like it before.

And every second she wastes trying to figure out what to do and feeling sorry for herself, they are still being tortured.

She summons all the strength she can and smashes through the metal poles, chains, and locks all in one blow. Their lifeless bodies are thrown from the force of the impact, flung across the room like ragdolls.

She kneels next to Loki, the closer of the two now that they are freed. He is laying on his side, his arms trapped under his body and his head pressed awkwardly against the first step of the throne. She knows she needs to check them, make sure they are alive now that they’ve stopped screaming, and that her blow didn’t kill them. She can’t be sure of anything; she has no experience with Asgardian resilience against Mjölnir after being tortured by whatever that was. But she's afraid to touch him. Even the thought of putting her hand on his skin is enough to fill her chest with dread. She's sure she's never been more terrified of anything. She never wants to experience that kind of pain again.

She watches his skin closely, but there are no muscle spasms like she saw before. She tells herself it’s a good sign. So she takes a deep breath, steels her nerves, and reaches out a hand.

\--

One second Loki is embroiled in a fierce battle, killing Chitauri on all sides, and the next he is bound and on his knees before the throne. In it sits Thanos, the Mad Titan.

“Who dares attack Asgard!?” he shouts in his father's voice.

“I grow weary of your tricks, child. Still a boy playing at king. Pathetic.” Thanos' gnarled, cracked face scowls and he flicks his wrist.

Immediately, Loki's illusion is shattered. Next to him, he can hear Thor suck in a breath.

“You have what you came for!” Loki screams and pulls against his chains.

“Not yet,” Thanos says, that same maniacal gleam of utter insanity he’d had when he sent him to Midgard. Loki can still remember what it felt like to act without volition. It’s a putrid thing, the fear and hate that collects in his soul. “First, you will watch Asgard burn.”

“No!” Thor roars and struggles against the chains that bind him. But Loki can’t bring himself to fight. He knows there’s no use anymore.  Even just the Tesseract is too much power for Thanos. But now that he has all the infinity gems, Loki can only feel a hollow, desperate kind of rage that burns inward.

This is his fault. All of this. His mother’s death, his father’s imprisonment, the destruction of the home he loved more than life itself. His home, his world, his family lies in ruins at his feet. All because he was a petty, arrogant boy who coveted what his brother had. He hated his father for lying to him. He hated what he was, the monster that Odin saw in front of him. He’d been hurt. Wounded and vicious and a fool. He only ever wanted what was best for Asgard. He would have given all of himself to that end, and he did. He just didn’t see, didn’t understand that it wasn’t him who was the better ruler. He’d always been jealous of Thor’s easy grace and beauty. He envied their father’s favor, craved validation and a chance to prove himself.

He was so committed to protecting his home - not by birth, but by choice - that he was willing to destroy an entire race. He thought he was saving Asgard. Had he known then what he knows now, he would have gladly exiled himself to Midgard in Thor’s place. Looking back, he feels the delicate strings of his own fantasies unravel.

He was never a hero, he was never meant to rule. If only he’d taken his brother’s hand. He never would have fallen into the void or met Thanos or revealed the glorious, shining city made for gods.

He sees now that all he has ever touched has been tainted. Like a swath of plague, he infects life and cities with ruination. How the Norns must have mourned when he was made. The gruesome, bloody strings they wove of his fate must have felt like sewing their own destruction. How they must have hated him, an ugly blue thing no one in the universe wanted, save one.

At least his father will not perish this day. That is his only solace as Loki watches Asgard razed to the ground. All around them, buildings topple like castles made of sand, washing out to sea. There is no one left to kill. Thanos has already made a grand offering to his Mistress. Nothing can save them now, not even the lady he seeks to woo. Loki already knows death is a realm, not a woman.[25]

“Does it hurt, boy, to see the city you loved so dearly bathed in the blood of your people?” Thanos mocks him, but Loki can only watch with dead eyes as the golden citadel of his childhood crumbles.

“Loki, what have you done?” Thor asks and Loki chokes on the ashes. The taste of death is bitter.

There is nothing for him now. No salvation, no hope, no way to save them. Loki looks on with impotent rage as Thanos plunders a golden gauntlet from the pile of his father’s cherished weapons. It’s an old relic, older than the stories that have passed from generation to generation. He knows only that it was forged by the dwarves of Nidavellir when Odin’s father’s father was king. With a horrible sinking sensation in his heart, Loki realizes what it must be.

“At last, you will see a _real_ King,” Thanos proclaims as he begins plucking the glowing gems from the knuckles of the gauntlet. And Loki knows, he knows without a shadow of a doubt what that gauntlet was made to hold. And now Loki has given them to him. Handed Thanos not only his home, but the universe itself. There is nothing beyond his power now that he controls all six gems and gauntlet. “You should feel honored, Loki Laufeyson, that We are allowing you to see the end of all things. Who else can say they are so privileged? She must come now,” Thanos mumbles, more to himself than Loki. He recognizes the faraway look and hushed tone. He speaks now of the object of his affection, the personification of death. Convinced that she will come to him if he shows true devotion, he has made it his raison d'etre to kill every living thing in existence to appease her. “I offer you half the universe in recompense for wrongs perpetrated against you by these unnatural creatures, with their wicked golden fruit of immortality.”

Loki is forced to watch as one by one, he takes six glowing gems from their housings and fuses them with the gauntlet.

Loki cries to see it, weeps for the first time since he was a boy. He knows Thanos will keep him alive. He wants Loki to witness his overtures as punishment for his failure in Midgard to retrieve the Tesseract. He will live long enough to watch half of the universe wiped from existence with a flick of a wrist.

And Loki must watch it, cowed, naked, and kneeling before his father’s throne in a mockery of the fealty he has betrayed while the monster who fashions death as an estranged lover looks on and laughs.

He will watch all of it, knowing that it was only attainable by his hand.

He has destroyed the universe.

\--

He thought perhaps he would feel something when it was done, as if he would somehow be able to feel the universe halved while he is bound and chained. He does not. He feels nothing at all.

“Brother?” Thor calls to him; tears strangle his voice. He must know now too. All is lost.

“I was never your brother,” Loki tells him, his own tears dripping from his chin. He is hollow, cold. He wishes it would be over already. Iðunn is dead, Asgard is no more. Loki, too, waits for death. He wishes to know her embrace so he might end his suffering.

“You have always been my brother. Family is not made of blood alone,” Thor mumbles, a faint flare of anger in his tone. He still thinks it matters.

“What then?” Loki asks. They’ve been left tethered in place while Thanos sees to the business of killing.

“Love,” Thor shrugs, as if it were an easy thing.

“Jötunn cannot love. We are monsters.”

“You have never been one of them,” Thor says reflexively.

“Then what was I?” Loki cries. He can feel a flood of grief pass through him, pushing the sweet obliviousness of apathy just out of reach. He cannot stop himself from acknowledging the despair anymore. Thor’s comments needle him, force him to let it in. He wishes he were a real monster now, unfeeling in all things. He wishes he were as callous as Thanos. Then he would never have to feel this kind of sorrow. But he can’t. He’s never been the villain he imagined himself to be. But he’d been so young then. So untouched by misery and heartache, just a boy who didn’t understand where he fit. He’s sobbing now, wailing like a child and pulling at his chains, trying to crawl his way to his brother. “I was never one of you either! Father loved you most, doted on you in deeds and words. You were to be king! The Mighty Thor and Mjölnir, who _never_ judged me _worthy_! I have always been a monster. I have always been dark and broken and shameful. I’m a _disgrace_ , brother, how can you not see it? I am a stain on the great house of Odin!” His words come in a rush, flowing out of him like a fount of all his deepest fears. There is no need to lie anymore, or hide his crushing cowardice.[26] There is no point anymore. Nothing can be gained, no games to play, no tricks to be had. “I was never your equal,” he finishes, a pathetic whimper sealing his words.

“No,” Thor finally says. “How could you be when I loved you most?”

Loki, ignorant still, had not thought his heart could break anymore than it already had. He sees now he was wrong about that too. “I wish,” he says, a soft thing on his chapped lips, “I wish I’d known then what I know now. I wish I could do it again. I wish…” But he can’t finish. There is no way to end it. Wishing will not make it so. It is just enough to know that he was never truly alone. He is about to speak again, to tell Thor that he’s sorry, when Thanos sweeps into the great hall, a chittering procession of Chitauri fawn in his wake.

He should have killed them all when he’d had the chance.

“Why does she not come!?” Thanos screams, beating his great meaty fist on Odin’s throne, denting the delicate gold inlays there. “What more can I give her!? I have already given you half of the universe!” he curses the sky. “Do you require the rest?”

Loki feels bile in his throat. This is it. This is the end. He will die in a madman’s pursuit of an imaginary woman.

“Then you shall have it!” he declares. “I see now my error. It was not enough to erase life. That is too easy a thing.” Then he turns his gaze down, fixing his strange, glowing blue eyes on Loki. “I will give her a war to end all wars. I will pass from world to world of this paltry universe, slaughtering every last creature who _dares_ defy her in life. If I cannot make her come to me by offering sacrifices, then I will make her love me for the atrocities I will commit in her name!”

Then the world becomes unhinged. The gauntlet on his hand murmurs. Pale colored lights of each stone swirl in the darkness, performing his bidding. Loki has one last moment to contemplate his fate, his death, his life. And in so doing, there is no resounding lesson. There is no more introspection that could save his soul.

Instead, he spends the last moments of his life remembering happier times.

~~

He is but a child, a boy on his father’s knee. They feast alone in the Hall of Victors, for today his father has won a great battle. He drinks and toasts his comrades in celebration. His mother fills her husband’s chalice and she smiles with such tenderness Loki thinks there must be something of magic in love. His father’s speech grows thick and slurred with drink. But just when he’s certain Mother will banish them from the hall as those too weak willed to hold their liquor begin to brawl in the isles, Father raises a hand and the room falls into silence.

“Here, see that what we have done today will be passed from father to son, just as the tales of Kings of Old have been passed to me.”

Loki sits a little straighter, knowing his father is about to tell an epic. A rare occurrence, even for such times with Odin. He is not the great wordsmith his father, Borr, was. So when Odin would indulge he and his brother, Loki always had a keen interest. He committed each word to memory. He molded himself to be a receptacle for the precious accounts that would one day pass to the next generation. It was his duty to listen and remember.

“Who would you like to hear about?” Odin asks and Loki is so overcome with anticipation that at first he does not notice his father has spoken to him. For only twice before had Odin ever asked them which stories they wished to hear about. And always it was of Thor. But this time Odin’s hand is warm against his neck, his thumb rubbing lazy circles there, and his eye is glassy but bright and it is not Thor he looks to for words, but his second son. Loki.

“Me?” he asks, his voice jumping in fright.

But he only laughs, deep and untroubled. Next to him Thor and Mother laugh too, like it were such a simple thing, to be so honored. “I do not see another,” Odin says after a time and Loki feels like he might burst from joy.

“Ymir, sire. I wish to know of Ymir,” Loki asks with bated breath, for he fears above all his father might not approve. But he has such a desire to hear of it, for Thor has never asked and Odin has yet to tell of the great giant who came before.

“Well chosen, son. I have yet to tell of Ymir, the Creator.”

“Yes, father,” Loki answers, his heart swelling to be complimented so. All around him the men hush and focus on his father. For he may not have the knack for narrative as his father did, but his voice is rich and warm and his words flow like paint from a brush.

“There was in times of old, where Ymir dwelt, nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves; Earth existed not, nor heaven above, 'twas a yawning gap, and grass nowhere. Then went all the powers to their judgement-seats, the all-holy gods, and thereon held council, who should of the dwarfs race create, from the sea-giant's blood and livid bones. Of Ymir's flesh was Earth created, of his blood the sea, of his bones the hills, of his hair trees and plants, of his skull the heaven; and of his brows the gentle powers formed Midgard for the sons of menn; but of his brain the heavy clouds are all created…”[27]

Loki sits on his father’s knee, enrapt into utter silence. He does not even acknowledge his brother’s looks that seem to speak of his pride at Loki for having selected so well a tale, or his mother’s sly, artful smile so full of affection he would have blushed otherwise. Loki commits to memory each word, each inflection as his father’s deep voice rolls and rumbles in his chest with the language of old.

It is the happiest memory of his life.

So Loki retreats there in the fleeting seconds before Thanos turns his cunning savagery on him.

It is the last thing he knows before time loses all meaning and he is lost to torment. He is burning from the inside out, aflame with a pain that continues without end. It stretches out, unfurling like the great tongue of Auðumbla itself. Being a celestial thing, greater than some and lesser than others, he exists at a point between time and eternity. He will blaze into aeviternity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [24] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/133479079065>
> 
> [25][Hangman’s Hands](http://archiveofourown.org/works/407293/chapters/984714) by Mecruie
> 
> [26] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/129723237790>
> 
> [27] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ymir#Poetic_Edda>


	10. Chapter 8: Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane finally gets to Asgard, now she just has to get Loki to cooperate with her. It will just take a little convincing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to put out, I got behind with all these holiday exchanges I signed up for.

“All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are all made of starstuff.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

\--

Jane tenses as her fingers make contact with the skin of Loki’s side. But there is no pain, no flashing reign of terror, no timeless agony. There is just cold, clammy flesh that rises and falls with such terrifying effort, Jane can feel tears stinging her eyes.

He’s alive, at least. Carefully, she rolls him over onto his back to check his face. He is practically dead weight so she lays his head on her thigh to steady him. His face is gaunt and pale. He grimaces in his sleep and he looks so small and fragile that Jane forgets that he thinks himself a god. He looks every bit as breakable as those Chitauri.

Satisfied that he is alive and unmaimed, Jane moves to lay him back down, perhaps turn him on his side again to spare his modesty. But when she lowers his head from her lap, she feels a light touch on her arm.

“Please,” he rasps out. His voice is so raw and haggard, she can’t imagine it doesn’t cause him discomfort. She leans forward so he won’t have to speak so loudly. “Stay with me, please.”

And her heart breaks for him, for this sad man who has made all the wrong decisions. She can’t bring herself to say no to him. Not after knowing what he’s lived through. It’s a miracle he’s alive at all. Though somehow she doubts he’ll see it that way. “Yes.” She nods and pushes his hair away from his face.

There is something in the way he looks at her. A naked reverence, an awe that she doesn’t know how to respond to. “You came,” he says, tears slipping unnoticed from his red-rimmed eyes. And Jane realizes she’s crying too. And everything that’s happened in the past few months feels like it reaches up and grips at the heart of her. She feels such a well of pity for this man that she is weeping with him.

“Yes,” she says, nodding. Her tears drip from her chin, making irregular shapes on his chest.

“We must stop him!” he exclaims after the few seconds he spends openly gaping at her, like he still can’t believe she’s real (or here, more likely).

“Who?” she asks, gripping his arms tightly as he thrashes, like he’s trying to figure out how to stand.

“Thanos!” he shouts the name, which of course means absolutely nothing to Jane. “He’s come to kill us all,” he whispers, reaching up with shaking hands to hold both sides of her face. His fingers tangle in her blonde hair and she hadn’t even noticed until then that her helmet is still lying on the floor where she passed out before.

Then she watches as the light fades from his eyes. He takes a deep shuddering breath, and goes limp.

“Loki?” Jane says, shaking his shoulder. “Loki!” she screams his name when he doesn’t respond. She has no idea how to tell if an Asgardian is alive, considering she’d just flown through space for a week without the need to breathe. In shock, she grips her chest, taking solace in the feeling of a heartbeat at least. She presses her hand to his chest, but her own pulse feels too strong in her veins and she can’t be sure if the rhythmic beat is hers or his. Groaning in frustration, she pulls her hair to the side and bends all the way over to press her ear directly to his chest.

She holds her breath, because that’s a thing she can do indefinitely, apparently. And in the silence, she is finally able to discern a faint heartbeat.

“Thank God,” Jane mumbles and finally pulls away from him. But when she looks up, Thor is already sitting a few feet away, his blue eyes practically _burning_ with rage. “Thor!” Jane jumps, instantly seeking for the mask she knows isn’t there. Her fingers brush through her hair and she wishes she had the words for what needs to be said. “Thor…” She reaches for him and he visibly flinches away from her.

“How could you?” he asks, his voice just as raw and hoarse as Loki’s had been. She wants to go to him, to embrace him. She wants to apologize, to insist that he’s worthy. She wants to explain about Mjölnir, about dying, about everything. But she doesn’t. She can’t. She can’t when he’s looking at her like _that_. Like he’s erasing every good thing about her from his heart and replacing it all with fear and doubt and anger. Like he’s falling out of love with her.

And it isn’t until that instant that Jane realizes he had loved her. And now it’s too late. He will never look at her like that again. She’s bereft of it.

\--

Jane eventually recovers from the shellshock of having Thor discover her identity and goes to find them both something to wear. The palace is huge and with all the bodies littering the halls Jane doesn’t want to venture too far, but it takes her some time before she stumbles into a large room that has several shallow pools. The pools are all red now, bodies floating face down, spears through their back. They fell where they stood. These servants didn’t even have a chance to run. It must have been the washroom for the entire complex. Jane fishes through the neat, orderly piles of clothes stacked on rolling carts. She’s sure Thor’s clothes are somewhere else, God only knows about Loki. In storage or left to dust in memorandum maybe. She settles for _anything_ that looks like it might fit.

She got pretty good at clothing Thor, so she knows what sizes to look for. And Loki, well, he’ll fit into anything Thor will (with room to spare), so she grabs fistfuls of linen shirts and leather pants she thinks will do the job.

When she gets back to the great hall, Loki is awake. He’s sitting with his back to the stairs, folded over on himself. She tries to hand Thor a shirt and pants, but when he refuses to take it from her or speak to her, she gives up and drops it at his feet.

She has to call Loki’s name three times before he looks up. But he takes the clothes, his fingers grazing over hears. At the touch, the pain seems to ease from his features. She's not sure what to make of that, so she just ignores it for now.

They both dress when Jane turns away. Thor forgoes the shirt and sits on the far end of the steps in nothing but a pair of pants. His bare feet make Jane's heart ache. Loki looks absolutely pathetic in the clothes. The red shirt is huge and the color looks all wrong on him. He has to hold the pants up at his waist and his legs stick out a good three inches at the bottom because he is too tall.

She wants to give them time to rest, to deal with the fallout of their home's destruction. But Jane feels like they can't afford it.

“Who is Thanos?” she asks and both men look away.

“A madman,” Thor finally answers.

“No,” Loki says, “not a man. He is a Titan, a race older than the nine realms. He is eternal, without end.”

“He believes Death to be a woman who has turned against him. He wishes to appease her by killing,” Thor explains and Jane feels queasy at the thought.

“And he's after these… artifacts?” she asks them.

“Artifacts?” Thor says, unsure what she means.

“The gems. The infinity stones,” Loki answers.

“He no longer seeks the infinity stones. He already has them,” Thor explains. “How long has it been?” And she understands that he can't tell how long they've been caught in that torture.

“A week,” Jane says, feeling small and ashamed. If only she'd gotten to them sooner.

“How did you come to be here? Has Heimdall survived? Did he send for you? Or Father?” Thor asks, and Jane feels his hope so keenly that she almost doesn't want to answer.

“Heimdall is taken, brother. Thanos has use of his sight.” Loki's tone is cutting, as if he thinks Thor is an idiot.

“And what of Father? Or have you made us orphans?” Thor yells, the muscles of his neck pulled taunt.

“Gone,” is all Loki says.

“From where?” Jane asks. She doesn't want to punish him for his deceit, but she needs to know in case it would help or hurt.

“A place between realms, an untouchable place,” Loki says, looking away.

“You mean no one but you and your master? You took him from his home, from the light of Mother's star to rot like a criminal!”

“Like me, you mean? And Thanos is no master of mine. After you left me to die in the void, he plucked me from the in between, subjugated me with the mind stone and commanded me tell him of Asgard and Midgard. I could no more have resisted than you did, brother.” Jane is consistently surprised at how cutting Loki is always able to make the word ‘brother’ sound.

“The gem?” Thor asks, and there is a fear in his voice, a kind of desperate desire for clarification that Jane can't keep quiet anymore.

“It's true,” she says and both brothers look at her as if they'd forgotten she was even there. “Where do you think the Chitauri army came from?”

“I knew he had a benefactor,” Thor admits.

“And you never once questioned it? Did I strike you as someone who so willingly followed others?” Loki asks but his anger is waning, his emotions beginning to bleed through.

“I didn't know what to think!” Thor screams at his, tears already glinting on his cheeks. And Jane feels like she's caught in a terrible volley of grief and pain that has no end.

“So what do we do?” Jane interrupts them but they are staring at each other, like they're embroiled in an unspoken battle. “Thanos has the stones. There's no telling what he will do. We need to get back to Earth, we need to assemble the Avengers and figure out how to stop him.”

“What can mortals do that gods could not?” Loki says scornfully.

“Would it kill you to be helpful for once!?” Jane yells and that starlets both of them into a brief silence.

“He is not wrong, Jane. Thanos has already used the stones. He affixed them to a gauntlet and wields it now without reservation.” There is something in his face, a resignation that terrifies her.

“Used it how?” she asks, trying to get to the root of the gnawing fear that's eating away at her core.

“She doesn't know,” Thor says not to her, but to Loki. And there is a tenderness there, the way someone pities a child when they have to be told a sad truth.

“Know what!?” she exclaims as panic rises in her chest. She feels like she might drown in it.

When the answer comes, it isn't from Thor, whom she has come to expect as the bearer of truth in this surreal conversation. Instead it's Loki, who looks directly at her for almost the first time since he woke from the torture. And when he speaks, there is such unabashed compassion in his voice that Jane feels her knees go weak as she buckles under the weight of her own horror.

“Half of all life has been forfeited, by his whim. With a wave of his hand, as if it was nothing, and to him it was. He feels nothing, he seeks nothing but death, and he now has the power to make every terror a reality. He only has to will it to make it so. I’m sorry, Jane, but there is no way to defeat him. There is nothing we can do.”

“Half,” she asks, desperately trying to make her mind make sense of what he’s saying. She feels her legs give way and she finds herself on her knees before the throne of Asgard, praying to be wrong.

“Half of all living beings in the universe have been wiped from existence,” Thor confirms.

But no, that can’t be right. “When?” she asks, trying to somehow prove them wrong. How could it even be possible?

“A week,” Loki answers and Jane knows what he’s saying. For as long as they have suffered, the universe has been cleaved in two. The living and the dead. Did they fall where they stood? Did they disappear? Did he wipe out their lives, as if they’d never lived? Do those left alive remember? Is it half the Earth, or half of whole systems, planets treated as a whole? What would be worse, she finds herself contemplating. What horrific version does she hope for? That there is a whole Earth but a dead Asgard or half an Earth? Is she missing memories of loved ones even now? Does she not even know to mourn them?

“No, no, no.” Jane finds herself shaking her head, holding her hands to her ears, sobbing on her knees. _Make it not real. Make this a dream. Make this not be happening._

And the combination is all too much. What Thanos has done, becoming Thor, dying, space travel, even Loki calling her by name; it piles on top of each other until there is no way to breathe. And she realizes that she’s hyperventilating, which is ridiculous because she doesn’t even _need_ to breathe, but she still feels herself gasping and clawing at her chest. This is a panic attack, this is beyond her control. “No, no, no, no,” she says it over and over again. She curls into a ball, the metal armor she wears scraping across the gilded floor like nails on a chalkboard.

“Jane.” Someone is calling her name. But that’s not her name anymore. Jane is dead. She died a week ago. She just forgot. She’s been living on borrowed time.

\--

Loki watches as she twists into a fetal position, her hands covering her ears and muttering ‘no’ over and over again. And something about seeing it makes him envy her. Because when he looks at her, he doesn’t see weakness. He sees a reflection exactly how he feels. He’s not sure what’s stopping him from doing the same, from folding up on himself and turning inward to escape the atrocities of this world. Perhaps it will come in time.

For now he leaves her to Thor; she is his paramour, after all. They can look to each other, speak softly of grief and pain and embrace. Loki has no desire to watch the desperation of those who cling to life confuse despair with love. He wanders out of the throne room, happy to put as much distance between him and it as possible.

He could leave. He’s considered it. He could pool his magic and concentrate its point of origin and direct it outward, send himself as far from home as he can imagine. Exile himself until he finds the end of immortality. How long can a god live without the enchanted apples of the Orchard? He doesn’t know, but surely it can’t be long. He could live what remains of his life as someone else. A new name, a new planet. No brother, no father, no mother, no home.

But almost as soon as he thinks of it, he decides against it. He is Loki Odinson, of Asgard. Thanos had been wrong when he called him ‘Laufeyson.’ Since his birth, that was just as untrue as Thanos’ insistence that death was a woman. He was not a Jötunn, though he was not an Asgardian either. He was nationless. A nation of one.

Not that he could disappear himself now, even if he wanted to. He already knows he’s too weak to be able to transport himself farther than his own chambers. Not that he wants to go there either. He has no wish to relive his childhood, or the troubles that led him to set this eventuality in motion.

Instead he finds himself in the room where his mother was killed. A beautiful room with a shallow pool that has been adorned with a charm to display the queen just before her death. She’d used an illusion, like the kind Loki favored. And indeed it had been his mother who taught him to project his or others’ likenesses to unoccupied space. She’d been cunning to the end. Brave and strong and beautiful.

Loki sits next to the memorial that now stands where she fell. The golden tree of Læraðr, rested atop Valhöll, where his mother had surely gone to rest. She died in battle as fierce as any warrior of Asgard. How its halls must be bursting at the rafters now. There is only one left to join them. Once Thor is dead, the doors to Valhöll will close forever.

He will never see his family again.

So he sits in silence next to his mother’s grave and weeps and weeps and weeps.

\--

Jane wakes up in an unfamiliar bed. Thor is next to her, his arm thrown over her like he used to when they lived together. And it’s not like Jane has forgotten what’s happened; more like when she’s trapped under his comforting weight, the horror of it is muted. It doesn’t feel as immediate or paralyzing. She can breathe again.

He stirs almost as soon as she wakes up, sensing a change in her breathing probably. She sits up and calls to Mjölnir. She can feel it fly through the empty halls, over the decomposing bodies and into her waiting hand.

Thor recoils from her and she can see the light fade from his eyes, as if he is remembering all over again that he hates her.

“Sorry,” she mumbles. She means it about everything. Wielding Mjölnir, not coming sooner, hiding her identity, sending him away, Thanos… it’s meant to be a blanket apology.

“Don’t,” he says and stands.

They must be in his room. She can see the red and gold motif that’s sort of his signature. There is a rack of weapons above the bed, and she feels strange seeing this private side of him now that they aren’t together anymore. Like she’s invading.

“We need to get back to Earth. We have to warn them, come up with a strategy.”

“How did you come? Can you not return the same way?” he asks, pulling on a cloak, but still no shirt. He seems fine with the pants she found him. He doesn’t seem to care he’s wearing a dead man's pants. She wants to ask him why she can’t smell the dead, but that seems really insensitive and gross so she doesn’t. But ever since she landed, she’s wanted to know. She can smell Thor in this room, smoke in the streets, sweat and vomit in the throne room, but never putrefaction of flesh.

“I finished work on the Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” she explains and she watches his face cycle through pride and joy at her accomplishment to disappointment at their unresolved issues back to an even neutrality that he probably thinks hides his feelings. She won’t tell him otherwise; she won’t steal that from him. She’s already taken too much of his pride.

“How did you plan to return, then?”

“Loki,” she says, finally getting up from his bed. She’s still in her armor and she wonders if she can even take it off or is it somehow fused to her. For that matter, she hasn’t gone to the bathroom in over a week. She has no idea what Mjölnir’s power really means, physiologically, but whenever she thinks about it she just ends up with more questions than when she started.

“Ah,” Thor nods, but his eyes are on Mjölnir. “It’s changed,” he says, pointing to it. “The inscription.”

“Really?” she asks, lifting the hammer. “What changed?” It seems the same.

_Whosoever holds this hammer, if she be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor._

“‘She,’” Thor says, pointing to the pronoun.

“Oh, right,” she says and chuckles. It seems like such a silly thing, to change a pronoun just for her. If it said ‘they’ instead of a he or she it wouldn’t have to change. “Wait,” she says, finally realizing what that must mean. “I am the first woman to wield Mjölnir?”

“Yes,” Thor says and looks away before he adds, “I did not think it was even possible.”

“That’s a little sexist, isn’t it?” Jane says and he shrugs.

“Perhaps. There are many things I am ignorant to,” he concedes and Jane knows he’s referring to Loki. His deceit and his real connection to Thanos.

\--

Loki finds them in Thor’s room, asleep together, and something in his chest seizes at the sight. Like a malady of the heart it leaves him breathless and weak. For even when the world is ending, Thor has managed to find peace while Loki has only found death.

He leaves them to their private moment and continues on to his looking chamber. In his two years spent as Odin, he often left Asgard in mind and not body, lest Heimdall begin to suspect him of subterfuge. So he crafted a room, like a study, with books and tomes his father always loved so dearly. He called it his sanctuary. And after the loss of Frigga, none found this to be out of character. He craved silence and his own council.

And for all the world he was just a king in mourning. But in his study he hid himself away so that he might travel among the cosmos in mind alone. Visit worlds he had no name for, watch over Thor's temperament, and listen for signs of Thanos.

That is where he heads now. It is still a safe haven for his body when he projects his consciousness across the stars. There is something that irks him, a question of means he has yet to make sense of. How is it that Thanos came to possess all the stones? Where was the soul gem? How had it come to him? And what of the gem of power? When last he'd seen it the wretched thing was under the careful protection of a vast and advanced military.

These are things he must resolve. Even if just to satisfy his own curiosity.

\--

“Where would Loki go?” Jane asks after they check a third place that Loki isn't in. She figures they all need to sit down together and discuss everything they know, but mostly Loki, if they are ever going to stand a chance.

“I have no idea. I know not my brother’s mind. You seem to understand better than I, these days.” It's kind of a dick thing to say and Jane wants to be mad. But she honestly doesn't feel like expending the effort.

“Grow up,” she mumbles and finally does what she wanted to since they started looking. She asks Mjölnir.

There is a hum to it that she's only just beginning to recognize as recon mode. She grabs the back of Thor's shirtless cloak and tells him to hold on before she swings and lets loose Mjölnir. They weave and twist through the halls, eventually ramming into a wall beside an open door.

“What in Odin's name!” Thor cries and Jane has to stop herself from laughing.

“He's in there.” She points Mjölnir and waits.

“That can't have been necessary,” Loki says a few seconds later, walking out of the room.

“How did you--”

“She asked the hammer,” Loki cuts him off before he can even finish the question.

“You speak with Mjölnir?” Thor, if possible, looks even more scandalized than before.

“We need to talk,” she informs Loki, completely ignoring Thor's question. She really doesn't want to have to see his sad puppy face again right now.

“Anything for Thor,” Loki replies and Jane sort of loses it.

She finds herself thwacking him with Mjölnir hard enough to send him careening into a wall. Once he's down she not too delicately drops it on Loki's hand like a literal non-US standard ton of bricks.

He curses and scrambles to dislodge it, but Jane already knows it will not be moved from where she has set it.

“Let's get something straight, Loki. I hold you responsible for what's happening. You may not have meant for things to go wrong, but if you hadn't been acting like a spoiled child throwing a temper tantrum because daddy didn’t like you best, this would not be happening. Do not mistake my empathy for weakness or my compassion for forgiveness. When this is over, you will have many crimes to answer for. But right now we need you, so I'm willing to work with you for as long as you remain useful. Otherwise I will drop you off at the Frost Giant home world and let you answer for attempted genocide.” Jane stands over him while he whimpers. She might feel bad for him being tortured and losing his home, but that doesn't mean she's going to let him keep dodging her questions and poking the sleeping bear between her and Thor.

“All is not well in paradise, brother. Have you not attended to Lady Thor's _needs_ of late? How remiss of you. Shall I try?”

“That's it!” Jane roars and rushes him. She lands a solid blow to his chin, and Mjölnir stays in place, making him feel like a punching bag the way his body flies away from her strike only to swing back again when Mjölnir halts his momentum. She punches him at least three more times before Thor manages to drag her off him.

“It is not worth it, Jane. This is his way. He uses anger to deflect.”

Jane already knows that, but she's so sick of jumping through his hoops she just wants to destroy something. She groans in frustration and lands another punch into the wall beside Loki's head so hard it shatters the marble into a fine powder that coats them all in a white sprinkling of wall. She doesn't admit it, but the fact that it doesn't even sting her hand kind of freaks her out. If she's not careful, she could really hurt someone.

“You will help me,” Jane leans in and whispers in his ear as menacingly as possible, “or I _will_ kill you.”

“Your threats are as hollow as his,” Loki says, throwing his head in Thor’s direction.

“Try me,” she says, getting her face just inches from his. She wants him to see her resolve. And she thinks it might have worked when she sees a flicker of actual fear in his eyes.

“Help us,” Thor implores and Jane had forgotten he was still there, her focus being so intent on Loki.

He is a pain in the ass, and she is wasting more energy on how to _handle_ him than she can spare. Every exchange she has with him feels like a war. It leaves her fatigued and sore, like performing mental gymnastics over how to communicate with a pathological liar. Then she remembers her conversations with him in prison and on the moon. While he hadn't exactly been _nice_ either time, she feels like they were on more even footing.

It's worth a try.

“Thor, can you leave us for a minute? I want to talk to Loki alone.”

At first there is no response, but Jane doesn't look away from Loki. She needs to see his reactions to better anticipate how to speak to him.

“Fine,” he eventually says before he stalks off down the hall, to his room no doubt.

“Worried what I might say?” Loki asks once they're alone.

“Worried what I'll do if you don't start talking.” To that, he laughs and Jane tries to reign in her anger. “What do you want?” she finally asks.

“What?” he asks and Jane is close enough and focused enough to see how genuinely confused he is.

“You always want _something_. Power, freedom, recognition. Tell me what you want, and I will get it for you if you agree to help me.” She’s not even sure this is going to work. What would he want and would it even be in her power to give it? What if he wants to be the supreme ruler of Earth? She has no right to make promises like that. But somehow she already knows that’s not what he wants. She’s learned him, more than she ever thought she could, in the time she has known him. And he is nothing if not petty. So she has an idea of what he will ask before he even agrees.

“You think you can bribe me?” His voice, though, is light. He is amused. He doesn’t show it on his face, but she can practically hear the leering smile in his voice.

“No. I think I can _negotiate_ with you. There must be something you want. All you have to do is tell me what I want to know and point me in Thanos' direction when the time is right.”

He seems to think about it for moment. Like he's giving it a lot of consideration. But when he finally settles for ‘a kiss,’ Jane knows it’s an act. He always knows what he wants, to drive a wedge between her and Thor. That way he won't feel so alone. And while she can understand his motivations, it doesn’t make it any less shitty. She knows he is petty and immature and chronically envious of Thor, but she’d hoped that watching his entire planet be killed might have cured him of it. It seems now though, her initial guess about what he would want is right. He wouldn’t dare ask for something she _couldn’t_ give. He is far too smart for that. She knew he would ask for something that she knew was within her power but would cause her or Thor pain. Something that was just on the cusp of possible, but would be impossible for her for some personal reason. He doesn’t want to rule planets. Maybe he never did. [28] He is just like a child crying for attention. ‘Look at me.’ ‘Notice me.’ ‘See what I can do.’ And every interaction she’d seen between he and Thor always boiled down to that one, simple, sad motivator. He craved attention above all else.

So Jane leans in without a second of hesitation and kisses him. And not just her lips smooshed against his; she kisses him like she's eighteen and on her second date in a dark movie theater. She kisses him with abandon. She presses her armor-clad chest against his, her fingers finding purchase framing his face and tangling in the hair of his temples. She closes her eyes and pours every last ounce of desire into the kiss. If this is what he wants, she will not hesitate to give it. This is within her power, this is her choice and her body and she is just as capable of wielding her lips as weapons as her fists. She will make him yield to her, cave beneath her, until he is rendered into submission.

At first his entire body is rigid, like a corpse in the throes of rigor mortis. He is a stiff, wooden puppet without a soul. But then she accidentally scrapes her nails against his scalp and his entire demeanor changes instantly. Suddenly he surges up, as much as he is able with Mjölnir still sitting on his hand. He grabs at her hair with his free hand, as if he means to drag her down with him. But as soon as he touches her, skin to skin, his touch becomes hesitant, delicate, in a way that Jane finds hard to reconcile with the man. He should be taking her for all she’s worth. This is what he wanted. Wasn’t it?

She’s not even sure anymore, because when he does move his lips against her, they are careful and precise. He leads with his bottom lip and kisses her upper lip. She can feel his jaw quivering in her hands and something settles in her, like a wave of recklessness that washes over her.

She pulls back a few inches and opens her eyes. He’s already looking at her, probably never closed them in the first place. She’s breathing heavily and she wonders if she will ever understand this new body of hers. Without breaking eye contact, she reaches down and plucks Mjölnir off his hand like it were nothing. And for her, it _is_ nothing. It thuds uselessly to the floor beside them before Jane dips her head and closes her eyes.

This is war. Everything with Loki is. And she is painfully aware of how much she needs him. She needs him to get home. She needs him to stop Thanos. She needs him to reverse whatever he’s done. She needs all these things. And she will fight for it. She will fight with Mjölnir, with her intellect, with every weapon she has in her arsenal. And if that means making out with a jealous man, she aims not just to give him what he wants - a placid picture of capitulation - she will use it against him. If he wants a kiss, she will give him more than he can take. She will not be the first to pull away, to admit defeat. If she can’t _make_ him help her, she will just have to make him _want to_ help her.

She will wear him down through attrition.

Without the hammer pinning him in place, she feels him straining up to meet her lips. His arms come up around her, pulling her flush against him from chest to hip. He practically pulls her into his lap, moving her leg when she gets tangled in her cape to straddle his pelvis. And he is no longer the tentative kisser he was before. His lips are firm and demanding as he takes her upper lip again in his.

His hands frame her face, his long fingers press into her skin, the pad of his thumb caresses her cheek while his middle finger strokes the sensitive skin behind her ear. And she makes a sound into his mouth, something like a moan which makes her cringe with embarrassment.

And that seems to be the cue he is looking for. Because he has her on her back in the hall, grinding against her like a sixteen year old who’s trying to crawl his way inside of her. She can feel him against her thigh and she is overcome with panic. She was not prepared to go this far. Or is this what she’d wanted? Did she want him to want her this much? How far is she willing to take this? Is she still winning?

His tongue is in her mouth, and she fights just to keep up with him. When he presses his hips down, she raises hers up in response. And there is a second, just a second, where Jane forgets that this is a means to an end. There is just a moment where forgets that she’s fighting him with her own body. She is just caught in the sensation of it, the feeling of being wanted, of being desired. It’s been so long. She and Thor haven’t had sex since she was first diagnosed. She spent the last six months of her life feeling tired and worn out and generally uninterested in sex. Not that losing her hair made her libido dry up. She just had more important things on her mind. And suddenly she is lying underneath Loki, with very tangible proof of just how much he wants her, and she’s not fighting anymore. She’s just kissing.

And it’s in that moment, when she is her most vulnerable, that he chooses to pull away.

Jane suddenly finds herself on her back, nobody looming over her, her legs spread, her hair tangled, her lips red and swollen, and she almost calls him back to her before she remembers this is what she wanted. She wanted to see how far she could push, what it would take to make him pliable.

And judging by the way he’s looking at her, like it’s taking a lot of effort to keep himself away, she thinks maybe she has won this round.

“Had enough?” she pants and the glazed expression of his eyes tell her that he craves more. So she files that away for later use. That Loki is an affection-deprived, tactile-seeker with severe intimacy issues. Not that she couldn't have guessed most of that without making out with him. Though in every way that matters, Jane knows there is much more to this than just lips. She can still feel where his fingers pressed into her hip with so much force he might as well have been testing her bone strength. And she’s a little disturbed to realize he actually _might_ have been doing just that.

“Have you?” he shoots back, though his voice is deeper than she’s ever heard it and she’s sort of ashamed to admit that she might be okay sleeping with him.

“You have what you wanted, now give me what I want.” She turns away from him, not because she’s ashamed, but because she wants him to _think_ that she is. She is playing him. She has since she asked Thor to leave. He likes to be in control, so she thinks of Thor catching them and blushes. He tuts, like he’s just realized she isn’t worth the effort and stands.

They each straighten their clothes and armor. She seems to have lost her cape in their struggle and she leaves it where it is. She’s dropping articles of her Thor outfit one piece at a time. They are littered across the great hall of Asgard and Jane can’t help but feel like it’s a metaphor for her life at the moment. How much of herself will she lose to this planet, to these brothers, she wonders. How much is she willing to lose?

\--

Loki watches as she glances forlornly at her discarded cape, as if it is a pet she’s misplaced. She looks at it like she’s sad to see it go, but unwilling to retrieve it. He has trouble understanding her, predicting her actions. He always has. Normally he can read people as easily as he reads the stars. They like to think they are complicated creatures, but once you understand the underlying flaw in their personality, it’s easy to know how they will respond. He’s made a sport of it in his life. A skill he learned early on that was necessary to survive. He plays people like instruments. Positions them how it suits his needs and watches as they writhe under his control.

But Jane, Thor, whoever she is, has always eluded his keen perception. She acts bravely when she ought to cower. She acts prudently when she ought to be reckless. She is angry at the oddest moments, offended by trivial things, and a little broken in ways he hadn’t thought to look for. There is a darkness to her, an almost wicked cunning that she seems to only display when they are alone together. He doesn’t understand it. And what he does not understand, he cannot predict. Which means he cannot control her the way he wants to. It makes her dangerous, and alluring. He himself is not sure what to make of her actions just now. She kissed him because he asked, which he knew she would. But then she removed the hammer, and that look in her eyes as she did so was alarming. It felt like trust, like desire, like sincerity. He doesn’t know if he really believes her to be attracted to him, though her panting and moaning seem to answer that for him, or if she is just very, very good at playing him. And it was that, the fear that he was being analyzed and manipulated by her act of contrition that drove him to finally pull back. If it hadn’t been for that, he’s not sure how far he would have pushed. How far would she have let him? Did she want him?

These questions haunt him, needle him. Remind him again and again that she seems to have the upper hand at each exchange. It’s infuriating.

“What do you know about the infinity stones?” she finally asks, drawing him out from his reverie.

And something deep inside him settles. There is a nameless rage that eats away at him, for as long as he can remember. A bitter resentment that he does now know how to turn away from. But when she mentions the stones and he remembers the pain of Thanos’ torture and watching Asgard destroyed, the fire of that hatred is dulled. What is he still fighting for? His father is gone, there is no one left to quarrel over. If he wanted to be king, there would be no one to stop him. The lonesome king of a dead world.

He fears Thanos. But perhaps he fears eternity in Helheim, far from the gleaming golden towers of Valhöll even more. If he were to meet his end as he is now, that is most certainly what would await him. He has enough petty retribution still left in him to wish for Thanos’ demise. It’s a fool's hope, he knows that. The only question that remains in his mind is how does he wish to die? A coward on the run, powerless and disgraced? Or does he want to fight? Does he want to die a warrior of Asgard?

He already knows the answer. The only thing standing in his way is his own pride. Which, he thinks sadly, was always the thing that stood in his way.

When he looks up, Jane’s lips are still red and inflamed where he took what she offered. He does not wince in revulsion of his own actions, though he wants to. But maybe that’s what she wants. To make him feel ashamed.

Trying to divine her thoughts is tiring and he dislikes the way his own thoughts snap back and forth between remorse and resentment. Now is the time. He must choose. What is he willing to give, to lose, to do in order to restore his honor as a son of Odin?

\--

Jane watches as he seems to come to a difficult decision. She has no idea what he’s wrestling with, but when he finally bows his head and takes a deep, steady breath, she feels her own anxiety drain away.

“This is not the only universe,” he finally says and Jane’s shoulders sag in relief. He’s going to help. Everything else doesn’t matter. If he’s winning or she’s losing or if they are even playing a game anymore. She doesn’t care. God, she really, really doesn’t care. “There are many, many others. They exist on other planes.”

“Branes,” Jane says, finally feeling like she understands something for the first time in days. “They’re dynamic objects that propagate through spacetime. They have mass and charge and are capable, theoretically, of interacting with another brane’s world volume. You’re talking about superstring theory.”

“No, I speak of truth!” he corrects her and she rolls her eyes. “Not what your feeble human minds perceive reality to be, but of what is.” He has so much passion when he speaks about it, Jane thinks maybe it has something to do with what he calls ‘magic.’ And after seeing Frigga fight, she already knows exactly where he learned that.

“It’s science!” she argues.

“Ugh, science,” Loki groans in disgust and she has to try really, really hard not to think about the way he made almost the exact same sound into her mouth just a little while ago. “Science,” he almost spits the word, “is what you imagine when you cannot imagine the truth! Then you lie and call it fact. You obfuscate knowing and believing, when in reality they are the same.” He speaks to her like a child and she can actually feel herself getting more and more exasperated.

“Superstring theory, multiverse, M-theory, Brane cosmology, they’re all the same thing! You say ‘planes of existence,’ I call them ‘branes,’ but they’re the same. Just because I don’t use your terminology doesn’t mean I don’t understand. This isn’t some philosophical debate! This is physics. And I’m a physicist!” She feels her face heat up in anger and she wonders if this new body of hers blushes the way her old one did.

“You are small and fleeting and naive. I have lived hundreds of your paltry lives and will live hundreds more! Even now, Thor’s hammer cannot save you from your own genetic defects!” And that’s a low blow if she’s ever heard one.

“They aren’t _my_ defects,” she hisses, tears stinging her eyes. “You can thank the Æther for that.”

Which seems to surprise him for a second. But he recovers quickly. “You’re lucky you survived as long as you did. Most _mortals_ cannot withstand the power of the stones for more than a few seconds.” He advances on her a few steps, his sharp focus tunneling into her with startling force. “Yet you held the potential of the gem of reality within your meager form for days. I do not understand how such a thing could be possible.[29] You are a contradiction,” he says, taking a few more steps until he is towering over her, using his height to intimidate her. Like if he applied enough pressure, she would crack and share the secrets of her power with him. “Your body withers, yet you are able to wield Mjölnir when even Thor cannot. How?” He seems to have lost all sense of their previous conversation and in that moment, Jane realizes what the strange intensity is that’s always existed between them.

He’s curious about her. He’s _interested_. He looks at her and sees a riddle he can’t solve, and he can’t drop it. He’s drawn to her the same way she is drawn to the theoretical constructs of the physical world. He wants to understand, he wants to break her down to her base elements and study her. He looks at her like a novelty, an anomaly that doesn’t fit into his carefully constructed worldview of ‘truth.’ And that’s why he’s so upset about science. Because he can’t conceive how a lowly human woman could be on even ground with him.

“Because I am worthy,” she says, slowly articulating each word. His face falls in revulsion, like even the sight of her is offensive. She takes a deep breath and tries to calm herself down. She wonders what it is about him that can drive her to irrational fury so quickly.

“Do you wish to hear of the stones, or would you rather _negotiate_ some more?” he asks, that same festering acerbity she’s come to associate with deflection. She is unfazed though. She knows he’s on the offensive now and she has to tread carefully if she doesn’t want him to shut down entirely. They are balanced on the edge of a precipice and Jane holds the tether in her hands. She could play his game, lead him one foot at a time to water, or she could yank his reins, hang on, and hope for the best.

She already knows what she will choose. And maybe, so does he. “The stones.”

“Where another universe touches ours, a singularity is formed. There were six of them. Long ago, before any modern civilizations, these singularities were harvested and forged into distinct materials previously unknown to us.”

So, exotic particles that were collected and coalesced into discrete arrangements. Jane finds it helpful to translate his Asgardian metaphorical physics into something closer to what she can understand. But she’s learned her lesson about sharing those thoughts with Loki.

When she doesn’t interrupt, he squints at her, like he’s trying to read her mind, like he _knows_ what she’s doing and doesn’t like it. He pauses for a moment, but then continues.  “When concentrated, these substances form gemstones, each distinguishable by their appearance and powers. You are connected with the stone of reality, the Æther. And I to the mind stone. The Tesseract is also a stone, of space. A fourth stone was found in a realm not of the nine, the stone of power. There are two others, of time and soul. When I first encountered Thanos, he already bore the stone of time. I suspect he has since its creation, making him older than all of recorded history. He was still in search of the soul gem when I felt his dominion.”

“He must have found it,” Jane says and Loki draws himself up to his full height again. Something he seems to do when he doesn’t want to appear weak. And after admitting that Thanos had him under his control, now more than ever, he wishes to assert his own dominance. Jane doesn’t care. His fragile ego is the last thing in the world that matters.

“Yes, and now that he has, his powers are unimaginable. These stones, when separated can only be brandished by a being of inconceivable power. Given the desire, these bearers are capable of destroying entire systems. You must know of what I speak. You have felt the capacity within you, when you held the Æther.” Loki watches her closely and she is aware that he’s studying her once again. Looking for a clue to her uniqueness.

“Yes,” she confirms. “I felt its power. It could destroy the entire universe in the wrong hands. But without the will to use it for evil, it had no agency of its own. It was benign as long as I was satisfied to let it be. It only ever acted to protect me while I carried it. It was self-preservation.” She has spent a long time thinking about the Æther, especially after she was diagnosed. She doesn’t blame it any more than she blames Thor for his role in her exposure. It was just an accident, wasn’t it?

“That is true of all the stones. They do not act of their own volition. They simply grant the carriers the power to enact what they wish. Alone they can be ruinous, but when combined, they are cataclysmic,” he warns and for the first time Jane begins to understand how he could kill half the universe. She knew the kind of power the Æther had. And she knew about the Tesseract and a little about the scepter. But to imagine three _more_ inconceivable relics, each capable of just as much carnage, and then to combine their power? Her head spins and her heart sinks.

How can they fight him? When he can just flick his wrist and wipe them all out? There is no way to reason with something like that. Especially when the only thing he wants is to kill every last thing.

\--

Loki feels like he’s finally getting through to her. He can see the horror reflected in her eyes the exact moment she realizes just what a monster they are up against.

“Is there no hope?” she asks, and she is so small then, so lost and sad and young that Loki almost feels moved.

“You do your title dishonor, Lady Thor,” he says instead and fists his hands at his side.

“Will you fight?” she asks and there is such bare expectancy in her voice that Loki has to look away. He has never, in all his long life, had someone look at him like that. Like he’s a savior.

“Yes,” he surprises himself when he answers so simply. Surely there could have been a more cutting way to answer her. But he finds he can’t. There is something about her that makes him want to be honest. It’s a disconcerting feeling that he can’t seem to stop. What is she, this woman who kisses like she fights and dies with the grace of an immortal?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [28] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/124749227581>
> 
> [29] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/106731539436>


	11. Jane's Mission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jane finds out what they're up against

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry updates have been slow, I am re-writing whole sections of this because I wasn't' happy with it before so I don't want to catch up too fast. But the good news is when I finish my rewrites I should be able to post a chapter a day. I'll let you know what I finish so you can be on the lookout for more frequent updates.

“Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the Earth was.” ― Ransom Riggs

\--

Something between them changes after that. She asks him what they should do and he tells her what he’s learned in his excursions to other worlds. Though she doesn’t understand how, he is able to see other locations in the universe. He likens it to what Heimdall is capable of seeing, but she doesn’t understand how he can see either so she just accepts it.

Loki tells her that he found the source of the last gem, finally. For a time there was a collector that his father trusted with the Æther. He was also approached by another race of spacefaring people about possibly holding another one of the stones. But while there, something went wrong. Thanos became aware of this ‘Collector’s involvement. But it was only when Thanos came to take the Æther that he discovered the last stone, the soul gem. It was trapped in a cocoon with an artificial being. Thanos and ‘Him,’ as the being was called, fought for a long time. But in the end, Thanos won and killed Him.

Once he had that stone, he already knew where the rest were. That’s when he sent out agents to take the rest. That had been a week ago. His first act after acquiring the Tesseract was to kill everyone on Asgard and imprison Thor and Loki. Then he was able to assemble the gauntlet and kill half the universe.

Though, to hear him tell it, you would have thought Loki had been the one to condemn the universe. Jane could see the deep lines of shame in his face when he declared that it had been his doing. She wanted to argue, to insist that he wasn’t to blame. But she held her tongue. She knew, better than most, the guilt of surviving. And he wasn’t wrong. It had been his actions that led him to Thanos. He was as much to blame as anyone. But even Jane felt that heavy weight of responsibility as he told her about the Collector. If she hadn’t been so curious, if she never found the Æther, none of this would have been possible.

They both had blood on their hands. Or, at least, conscious. Because the more he spoke about Thanos and the gems, the more convinced Jane became that he did have one. Albeit underdeveloped and stinted, but it was there nonetheless. And not for the first time, she wondered that had happened in life that led him to the choices he made. What had it been like, growing up a prince of Asgard? To hear Thor tell it, he’d not been a pillar of morality either. She felt ashamed for thinking it, but having met Frigga and Odin, she was inclined to believe the latter had more influence that he should have.

When Loki got to his and Thor’s torture in the throne room, she could see the slight tremor in his shoulders at the memory. He told her that Death had not appeared to Thanos, like he wanted. At which point he declared that he would slaughter the rest of the universe in a war to end all wars. And as this new information sinks in, Jane realizes that this war, the ‘Infinity War’ is the looming shadow Mjölnir had been warning her about. This is why it chose her. This was her mission.

\--

“What about the other civilization?” Jane asks a few hours later, after Thor has joined them as they discuss what to do next.

“They are mounting their defenses now,” Loki tells them.

“Can you communicate with them?” she asks.

“Perhaps. There is a champion among them, a human actually. He has the intellect of a mule and the mouth of a parrot.” Jane laughs at his description and even Thor looks pretty amused. Loki obviously doesn’t like him.

“How did a human end up so far away from Earth?” she wonders but neither of them seem to care much. “We need to talk to him. Can you take us to him and then to Earth?”

“Perhaps,” he answers and for some reason she doesn’t think that he’s being vague because he doesn’t want to answer but because he honestly doesn’t know.

“We're going to need all the help we can get.”

“I have never used my powers to transport so many at such a great distance. I am…” He hesitates, his eyes flicking over to Thor.

“You need to rest?” Jane guesses and he looks so relieved she almost wishes she could help.

“Yes,” he admits, again checking Thor’s reaction. But Thor looks just as tired as he does.

“How long?” she asks and he seems to think about it.

“I must enter the Odinsleep for a day, at least, to regain the energy required.”

“Odinsleep?” she asks incredulously.

“I will stand guard,” Thor says, ignoring her confusion. So Odinsleep is something that will make him vulnerable, she's guessing.

“A restorative rest,” Loki says to her, then turns to Thor. “You require rest as well, if we are to mount an offensive.”

“If I must,” Thor acquiesces.

\--

The plan right now is that Thor will sleep for a day and Loki for two. Then Loki will transport them all to speak with the other army and then to Earth so they can round up as many forces and firepower as they can. They will hopefully be able to take her Einstein-Rosen Bridge to meet the others wherever Thanos is holed up.

But it's been over a week now since she left and she's worried about what they must be thinking. So she asks Loki to project himself and send a message that they are on the way.

He doesn’t seem very happy about it, but he agrees. He sits in the middle of his study for about twenty minutes while his sits perfectly still and his eyes go blank. When he returns to himself he mumbles something about Tony which Jane takes to be a good sign. Then he collapses.

She and Thor move him to another room to sleep. This isn’t the Odinsleep, Thor tells her. He must rest first then place himself into a chamber in his father’s room designed for that purpose.

“I will take my rest now,” Thor tells her once Loki’s been settled. She wonders what room this is; it doesn’t feel like Loki’s the way Thor’s had felt like his.

“Should I go with you?” she asks, standing up and stretching her arm.

“No, watch him. It is only for a day.” He turns to go and Jane wants to say something, make him turn around and kiss him like she used to. She misses the feeling of being loved by him. But she already knows that is gone, never to return. “If I am still asleep tomorrow, you will have to wake me,” he says just as he gets to the door.

“How?” she asks. They hadn’t gotten that far in their planning when Loki passed out.

“You possess the power of Thor,” he says like it’s an answer.

“Okay, but what does that mean?” she probes.

“I have never had to waken my father from his sleep before. I am not sure of how it is done.” Then he just walks away and Jane feels like following him out and beating him senseless.

But once he’s gone she just sits there for a while, watching the stars and sun outside the window. She knows she should rest too, but she has too much to think about.

She doesn’t want to roam the palace; there are too many dead bodies. Her heart breaks at the thought. There is no one to bury them, not anymore. And Jane knows what she’s going to spend the next day (how long was a day on Asgard?) doing.

\--

Jane doesn’t know a lot about Asgard customs, but she feels like she should honor these people in the best way she can. She knows the ancient Norse cultures of Earth would often burn their dead and scatter their ashes. So that is what she does. She finds a cart in a market, among rotten fruit and slaughtered animals. She goes block by block, collecting the dead and burning them. She calls down lightning to start the fires before starting on the next. Asgard is a huge city, but most of the people seemed to be concentrated around the capitol. It takes her the better part of the day to clear the streets. She burns Chitauri and Asgardians alike.

She wishes they all find peace in whatever afterlife they reach.

It takes all night to clear the palace. The great hall alone has over 500 bodies. She flies up and down halls, looking for the dead. She is sore and she hasn’t stopped crying since the sunset and she found what must have been a school. But she does what she has to; she tries not to feel it, tries to think of them as bags of grain when she lifts them onto her undertaker’s cart. She piles 30 high and wheels it to a blank patch of Earth on the grounds where she leaves them to burn.

When she is done, she is covered in blood and grime and every horror of war. She stumbles into an empty room and strips down before collapsing into the shallow pool in the center of the room. It’s a common enough feature of Asgardian interior design. She’s not sure what purpose they are supposed to serve, but she tears a drapery from the window and uses it to scrub herself raw. The water is freezing and Jane dry heaves so violently, she feels like she might have torn something in her side.

That’s where Loki finds her - sobbing, naked, still blood-stained, and too weak to even move.

“Fool of a woman,” he admonishes as he fishes her from the pink water, soaking his too-large pants and red linen shirt.

“It didn’t seem right,” she tries to explain, half delirious in her exhaustion. “To leave them like that.”

“You have done Asgard a great honor, Lady Thor,” he mumbles and Jane thinks maybe he means it.

“I’m sorry,” she apologizes and she’s not sure what for. Finding her like that or the loss of his home. A little of both, probably.

“Rest now,” he instructs and she slowly fades into darkness as he carries her from the frigid pool, cradled against his chest. And she thinks it’s strange; how warm he is, knowing what he is. How can someone so cold be so warm?

\--

Jane is woken up sometime in the night by screaming. She reaches out and braces as Mjölnir slams into her hand. She swings herself around 360 degrees, looking for the source of the attack. She hears another scream and runs out of the room she’s in to across the hall. Even though she already kind of knows what she’s hearing, she isn’t sure until she see Loki lying in bed, sweating and shivering and screaming like a frightened child.

Satisfied that she’s not in any danger, she drops Mjölnir by the bed and restrains Loki. He thrashes against her, pulling his shoulder free and elbowing her across the face, splitting her lip.

“Loki!” she screams, trying to wake him up. It looks like a night terror. She had a roommate in college who suffered from them. She knew it was best to leave a person alone, if she could. But in case she was in danger, Jane had to learn how to wake her up. It was part of their roommate agreement, along with them agreeing to accommodate her weird hours. Being an astronomy major meant she often had research to do at the observatory in the middle of the night and slept during the day. She’d only ever had to do it once, but she still remembered the steps.

“Loki,” she calls his name gently. She lets go of his shoulders slowly and does her best to touch his face softly. The trick is to calm them down and then wake them up. Almost immediately his thrashing stops and his screaming recedes into a kind of chilling whine. “Loki,” she says his name a few more times, as softly as she can.

His skin is cold and she remembers what he looked like after he woke up from the torture. It isn’t too hard to imagine what he was dreaming about.

He still looks fitful and pained, but he doesn’t look like he’s going to hurt himself or her anymore. Satisfied that he will be okay, she tries to get him back to a deeper sleep. She knows he needs to rest. Thor should wake up in the morning from his sleep and Loki will need to meditate or whatever it is they do to recover. If he keeps having nightmares every time he sleeps, it’s going to make his Odinsleep difficult.

So she does what she used to do for her college roommate when she was having bad dreams. She sings to him. Not like a serenade, but a dull mumbling of words she manages to recall. Which, in her case, is mostly piyyutim her mother used to sing on the Sabbath and high holidays.

She can still remember her mother, face bowed in prayer, the flickering light of candles making the shadows dance across her solemn face. Something about that memory had always stayed with her. The way her mother looked, framed in candlelight and still like a statue. She seemed so strong, so sure, so beautiful. The way she chanted her prayers while Jane sat as quietly as she could and tried to absorb some of her mother’s grace. It’s one of her fondest memories. So the music of it has stayed with her. And she sings them now, slowly and with as much tenderness as she can muster.

The longer she sings, the more at ease his face becomes. Until finally there is a peace there she has never seen in him. And she is struck by just how young he looks. She touches his forehead to be sure he isn’t feverish, but he is just warm now. She remembers him pulling her out of the bloodied pool and carrying her, naked, against his chest. She blushes in the dark at the memory.

Thankfully she isn’t naked anymore, and she assumes he used his magic to dress her. She can’t really imagine another way she came to wear the soft white linen tunic and pants. And she doesn’t understand him. He is fascinated with her, but he seems to hate her too. Yet he seems to be genuinely empathetic towards her at times, only to be callous and cruel the next. She can’t make sense of him.

And she wonders who the real Loki is. Is he the one who seems to relish every available opportunity to remind her that she is inferior? Or is he that quiet, sad man who picks her up when she is at her worst and takes care of her? Is he the monster who stole his father’s throne or the son who mourned his mother? Could he really be all those things?

“You sing beautifully,” Thor says softly from the doorway, the shadow of a heartbroken smile slipping from his lips, like she’d caught him in the process of reminding himself to hate her. “I didn't know,” he says it like its some great secret she’s kept from him. “Mother used to do that too, sing him to sleep.”

“It seemed to calm him down,” she whispers, unsure if she should move away from him or stay.

Thor leans against the doorway and crosses his arms. Even in the dark, he looks better than he had in days. “He pretends that I was favored most. But he forgets the way mother doted on him, coddled him well into adolescence. It drove father mad.” He smiles like he’s remembering one such occasion. “But she loved him so fiercely. Father may have paid me more mind. I was to be king, after all. But it was Loki whom he loved most,” Thor confesses and Jane is left breathless. There is so much sorrow in his words, a brokenhearted admission of his greatest humiliation; to be loved, but not enough. She has never seen this side of him before, and there is such a deep-seated insecurity in his words that Jane wonders how two parents could have made both of their sons feels so unloved[30]. “From the first instant Odin held him in his arms, a wailing blue infant abandoned and abhorred, my father's heart broke for him. He loved him as his son, not by birth but by choice.” She can see tear tracks on his cheeks in the starlight. “I do not know he could have loved me as such. I envied him,” he says and Jane can feel herself crying now too. “Even though he cannot see it, he has always been adored by all who come to know him. I expect you will be no different.” And that throws her. What does he mean, her too?

“No,” she says, holding her hand out to him. “Thor, it's not like that.” She’s not in love with Loki. She doesn’t even know how she feels about him, whether it's hate or pity, but she knows it’s not love.

But Thor just shakes his head. “Your time is short in this world, Jane Foster. Spend it well.” Then he is gone, leaving Jane with nothing but her pounding heart and the warmth of Loki’s skin against her hand. She can’t seem to move; she is too stunned by what he’s said.

\--

When Jane wakes up, Loki is gone and she is alone. She must have fallen asleep sitting next to him, just in case the nightmares came back. She cracks her neck and stretches, trying to work out the knots in her muscles.

“Where’s Loki?” she asks without turning around. She can _feel_ Thor watching her from the doorway.

“Gone to his rest,” he says and Jane nods. “Was it you?” he asks and she doesn’t have to wonder what he means. He means the pyres that are still burning from yesterday.

“Yes,” she answers.

“Thank you,” he whispers, and she does turn then, because she feels like she has to pay respect to the honor he’s bestowed on her. He opens his mouth to speak, but stops himself, then tries again. Like he’s changed his mind about what he wanted to say. “It is most odd,” he says, smiling, “how well you appear in my brother’s clothes.” Jane looks down at herself, noticing again the shirt and pants he dressed her in.

“I was a little out of it when he found me,” she explains.

“Exhaustion, no doubt. Had we the orchard, I would force you to eat. But any sustenance besides the golden apples of Iðunn will only be for the pleasure of eating.” And that at least answers that question.

“I take it breathing is also optional?” Jane jokes.

“Yes, a biological reflex only. It is not required.” He smiles and Jane feels so awkward. They used to be so compatible. They spent two years living together, and now they’re acting like strangers and it’s so hard to make sense of.

“I am sorry, Thor. I didn’t intend to deceive you.” She feels like they need to talk about this.

“You are Thor--”

“Everyone already knows it’s me. There’s no need for a mask or title now. I’m Jane, the same Jane as always. And you are still Thor. You just lost faith in yourself for a while.” She smiles wistfully, thinking of their last conversation together before he left Earth. “I’m still dying, you know.” They haven’t talked about it yet, and she feels like she has to. They need to work together. She will need him to trust her, to fight with her. And as they are now, she’s not sure they can. She needs to clear the air. “Mjölnir is the only thing keeping me alive as it is. And when you realize you are still worthy, that you always have been, I need to know you’re going to be okay.”

“What do you mean?” he asks so softly it breaks her heart.

“Without Mjölnir, I will die. And there can only be one Thor. So when you are ready to be Thor again, I will step aside.” God, she’s trying so hard to keep it together, but she’s telling him he’s going to kill her and she doesn’t know how to make that any less horrific than it is.

“No, Jane. I would never--”

“I need to know you will do what you have to, if necessary, for the sake of the universe,” she chokes out because this is really important. She needs to hear him say it. She needs to know that if the time comes, and it’s her or Thanos, that he will make the right decision. “I’m human, Thor. I always knew I would die someday. And I know it doesn’t make sense to you, but I’m mortal. That’s important to me. I don’t want to be an Asgardian, I never did. I want to die, and be buried next to my parents on my world. I’m not like you. I’m not the _real_ Thor.”

“You are more worthy of that name that I have ever been. You have a connection to Mjölnir I have never known. Even in all our battles, all the many worlds we fought together, I have never seen Mjölnir fly for me as it does for you. You must see that, Jane. You are not merely a placeholder. You are the Mighty Thor, as surely as my father was. Wield it well; it suits you. And if you should ever choose to lay it down, it may once again judge me worthy. But I will not be the one to take it from you. And I would be honored to fight at your side, as the Odinson.” His speech has her in tears and she can’t seem to think of what to say to that, so she just holds her arms out and he rushes to her. And this is enough, to know that he will be there with her. That they will fight together.

\--

Jane sleeps for a full day while Loki is in his Odinsleep. She dreams of an endless field of golden wheat under a light grey sky. There is a storm rolling in from faraway and Jane sits barefoot in the field, plucking nearby stalks and snapping them in her hands. The broken stalks splinter and fragment and she holds her hand up, letting the wind sweep it away. Beside her, Mjölnir hums and glows a faint blue light, and Jane smiles. She knows she’s going to get wet if she stays where she is, but she’s waiting for someone. The sun sets behind the coming clouds and she can smell rain on the wind.

 _Soon_ , she thinks. It will all be over soon.

She’ll go inside soon, but right now she wants to stay just a little while longer.

She’s waiting for someone.

She can see a dark figure approaching from the valley below her. She raises her hand and waves, smiling warmly, and Mjölnir is also happy. They wave back, too far to see their face, but she knows they’re smiling too.

They are almost home.

\--

Jane wakes slowly, the warm sun filtering in through the sheer white curtains in her borrowed room. She feels sad, almost wistful. She wants to keep dreaming, at least until the other person joined her. She’s not sure who she was dreaming about, but it felt like a friend. There are a few tears on her cheeks and she turns on her side, wiping her eyes. It’s strange; she’s only been here for a few days, but there is something about the unnatural quiet of an empty world that appeals to her. She likes it here. Even though she knows there are still piles of bodies burning, she has come to think of this place as a kind of home. And she already knows where that feeling comes from; she doesn’t need to wonder. It’s not Thor, its Mjölnir. It’s had a long life and remembers all of it. And it knows this place is home. There is an agitation in it that Jane knows comes from a place of fear. It doesn’t like the empty halls and solitude as it is now, but it is still home.

She is sad for it, that they will have to leave soon.

She finds Thor in a huge dining hall eating stale bread.

“Hey,” she greets and sits across from him. She rests her face in her hands and her elbows on the table.

“You cried in your sleep,” he tells her and looks morosely at the bread in front of him like he wants to eat it, but only because there’s nothing else.

“I was sad,” she answers truthfully. Straightforward honesty has always been easy for her and she’s glad she can speak with him like she used to. “You’re not very good at this, are you?” she teases him.

“What?” he asks, affronted.

“Waiting,” she says and shrugs. Mjölnir sits beside her on the bench and his eyes flick to the handle before he answers.

“I suppose not.” And even though she knows he doesn’t hate her or blame her for wielding Mjölnir anymore, she is still aware of the grief he harbors regarding his worthiness. She wonders what it must have been like, growing up learning to be a king. When had he first lifted Mjölnir? Had it always been his destiny? “If Loki does not wake by morning, you will need to revive him.”

To that, she only nods. What else can she say? ‘I have no idea how to do that’? That won’t do either of them any good right now. So instead she presses the palms of her hands to the worn wood of the tabletop and stands. “You know what?” she asks and he looks up, surprised to find her standing. “I’m hungry. I can’t even remember the last time I ate. And unlike the last six months, I might actually be able to keep something down.”

“Jane?” Thor says her name like he thinks he’s going insane.

“I’m serious. I haven’t been healthy enough to have an appetite in ages. There’s nothing else to do right now, and unless you really want to eat stale bread, come with me to wherever the hell the kitchen is in this castle and we’re going to make a feast.” She hefts Mjölnir over her shoulder and throws him the most cunning smile she can muster.

Besides the one night she learned to fly, she hasn’t really gotten the chance to reap the benefits of her new form yet. And the thought of eating real food is just about the best thing she can think of.

After a few seconds, Thor smiles back and stands. “Then a feast you will have!” he proclaims and gives her a bone-crunching one-armed hug. She wonders how much of his strength he put into it and all of a sudden, she knows how they’re going to spend the rest of the day.

“And after that, you and me, mister, we’re going to have some fun.”

“Fun?” he asks as he leads her down a hall.

“Fun,” she says as she butts his shoulder with the flat side of Mjölnir. “Unless you don’t think you can handle us?”

“Oh, Jane, you know not what you say. Hunger has made thee delirious.” He uses his best ‘Thor’ accent as he spins her in place. Then his face falls, like he’s about to lay some serious truth on her. “I will wipe the floor with you.”

“Ha!” Jane laughs and shoves him back a few steps. “Bring it, Odinson.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [30] <http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/post/118709729003>

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is (almost) complete, I just need to have it beta'ed. So I will be posting one chapter a week or as soon as I can get them edited and polished. If you know anyone who would like to beta, let me know. This monster is over 100k words so I could really use some help. There will be graphics to accompany this fic, post to my tumblr: [winter-ashby.tumblr.com/tagged/aeviternity](http://winter-ashby.tumblr.com/tagged/aeviternity) posted periodically. And you can see all the beautiful tumblr posts that helped inspire this fic here: [rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/tagged/aeviternity-insp](http://rosweldrmr.tumblr.com/tagged/aeviternity-insp).


End file.
